Bush tears up environmental rule book

Outgoing US presidents traditionally use their last few months in office to leave some kind of legacy, an indelible sense of their administration's defining philosophy. It looks as if George W Bush is not about to break with tradition.

If you are being generous, the philosophy Bush is attempting to enshrine as the removal vans close in on the Oval Office is one of laissez faire, pro-business, light touch regulation.

To the president's critics the last few days of the Bush White House are providing a tragic embodiment of the administration's complete contempt for the environment and craven desire to pander to the old school business lobby.

On Monday, the administration ignored objections from two governors and several members of Congress to announce new regulations that would allow commercial oil shale operations on up to two million acres of public lands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

The draft rules, which were released by the Department of Interior, cover royalty rates, lease bids and technical issues for oil shale production in the region and were accompanied by amendments to resource management plans in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming designed to block any public appeals against proposed projects.

Extracting oil from shale, sedimentary rock containing kerogen, remains in its early stages, but it is seen by many oil companies as a natural progression from tar sands operations in Canada, which use many similar extraction techniques.

However, the approach appalls environmentalists who claim that the energy required to extract the oil by heating the shale to extremely high temperatures means that the resulting oil has a carbon footprint between five and eight times higher than conventional oil.

The decision to lay the legislative groundwork for the creation of a giant US oil shale industry brought a predictable response from environmentalists who slammed the Bush administration for again pandering to the oil industry and failing to deliver adequate environmental safeguards.

The criticism was led by Amy Mall, senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, who accused the administration of not only showing contempt for the environment, but also offering a parting gift to Big Oil by proposing reduced royalty rates.

"Cooking rocks and scorching the earth is not a solution to our energy crisis," she added. "This is just another government giveaway to Big Oil, which doesn't make sense when we have better, cleaner energy sources available now. We need to invest in clean energy solutions - like plug-in cars - that will reduce our dependence on oil, not dirtier fuels that spoil public lands, hasten climate change and suck up limited water resources."

Attempts to open up vast swathes of land to oil shale development are just part of a wider pattern designed to roll back as many environmental protections as possible before Barack Obama takes office next January.

According to BBC reports, proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act will allow federal agencies to grant approval to new mining, drilling and construction projects without undertaking a full scientific assessment of the likely impact on local wildlife.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post has reported that Environmental Protection Agency is finalising new air quality rules that would make it easier for carbon intensive industries such as coal-fired power plants and oil refineries to be located near national parks, despite 14 regional administrators within the agency voicing objections to the move.

In addition, rule changes have also been proposed that limit pollution controls on new fossil fuel power stations and exempt many large scale agricultural livestock operations from the Clean Water Act, while only yesterday the EPA put forward new rules that will allow many construction projects to get away without installing systems to limit the runoff of metals and toxic substances into water ways.

Somewhat unbelievably, the White House has claimed that there is no orchestrated attack being mounted against green regulations, with spokesman Tony Fratto insisting that the changes are not politically motivated or part of an attempt to rush "regulations into place ahead of the incoming, next administration".

But there has been a marked increase in changes to environmental legislation and reports claim the campaign got underway early this summer when White House chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, wrote to government agencies asking them for proposals for rule changes. And it seems that changes designed to weaken environmental rules have been looked on particularly favourably with at least 10 major pieces of legislation being rolled back in recent weeks.

Following Barack Obama's election victory, one of the senior figures in his transition team, John Podesta, accused the Bush White House of "moving aggressively to do things that are probably not in the interest of the country" and hinted that the new administration would roll back any measures it disapproved of as quickly as possible.

Moreover, a report from the House of Representatives Select Committee on energy and independence released earlier this month attempted to head off many of the regulatory changes that were already in the pipeline warning that "while the first 100 days of the Bush administration initiated perhaps the worst period of environmental deregulation in American history, the last 100 days of a Bush presidency could be even worse".

But it appears that the thinly veiled warnings from Podesta and the House of Representatives to leave well alone have been largely ignored, with reports in The Guardian claiming that proposals to weaken regulations governing levels of perchlorate, a toxin in rocket fuel that can affect children's brain development, are to be put forward.

The only silver lining to this bonfire of the green regulations is that it is about to burn itself out.

New regulations take 60 days after publication to come into effect. That makes tomorrow the last chance for the current administration to get new rules finalised and in a position where the incoming Obama administration will have to jump through significant legislative hoops to get them reversed.

Let's just hope there are no more nasty surprises on the way in the next 24 hours.