ON THE AIR.(The Talk of the Town)(environmental policy)

Last week, on Earth Day, George W. Bush paid a visit to the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve, in southern Maine. For the occasion, he wore an outdoorsy-looking blue shirt, and a jacket embroidered with the reserve's logo--a fish swimming beneath a seabird. In Wells, the President discussed the importance of preserving wetlands, which, he noted, reduce the impact of floods, stabilize shore areas, and "provide recreational opportunities for guys like me," and later he assisted reserve staff members in collecting water samples. Since Bush had spent the previous forty months assembling what has been widely described as the worst environmental record of any modern President, his appearance presented a puzzle. Did it show how dangerous it is these days for a public official to defy the environmental movement, or the opposite?

The Bush Administration's singular contribution--if it can be called that--to the debate over safeguarding the planet has been the insight that, as with babies, a politician does not actually have to like trees in order to hug them. Even the most destructive proposals have been presented by the White House in the sunniest of rhetorical packages--the "Clear Skies" legislation, which would actually weaken existing provisions of the Clean Air Act; the "Healthy Forests" initiative, whose major beneficiary is the logging industry--and have come accompanied by blithe promises to, for example, "build on the remarkable air quality improvement of the last thirty years and do it in record time." When Administration officials speak out about the environment, it is not the goal but the way of achieving it that they profess to have doubts about. "Good conservation and good stewardship will happen when people say, 'I'm just not going to rely upon the government to be the solution to the problem,' " was how the President put it last week.

A clear, which is to say thoroughly tangled, instance of the Administration's strategy is its latest proposal on mercury. In high doses, mercury can cause mental retardation and even death; in smaller doses, resulting in blood levels of just fifty-eight parts per billion, it can affect neuromotor function in children. (According to a report put out last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one woman in twelve has enough mercury in her system to pose a risk to a fetus.) The largest source of mercury in the United States is coal-fired electric power plants, which release nearly fifty tons of the stuff annually.

After years of litigation, the Clinton Administration agreed in late 2000 to classify mercury as a hazardous air pollutant, a decision that would, under law, have required plant-owners to install millions of dollars' worth of new equipment to reduce their emissions. (The requirement is known in the industry as "maximum achievable control technology," or mact.) At first, the Bush Administration seemed to be ...