Comment; bad envoronments.(The Talk of the Town)(Bush administration environmental policy)

Many of the mountains of West Virginia have no tops. These were "removed," as in the mining practice known as "mountaintop removal," by companies seeking to get at the coal beneath. Earlier this month, one of the few limits on this highly efficient, if unfastidious, process was lifted, thanks to the efforts of the National Mining Association and the Bush Administration. Under the change, miners would be free to dump the waste, reclassified as "fill," pretty much wherever they wanted to, including in rivers and streams. Even though such dumping permits have been granted in the past, the change, which the association had sought, unsuccessfully, from the Clinton Administration, represents perhaps the most significant rollback of the Clean Water Act since it was passed, in 1972, and, according to a federal court decision issued in West Virginia last week, is of dubious legality. "It's not a giveaway to the mining industry," Christie Whitman, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said, defending the giveaway.

If it appears from the outside that the Bush Administration has relinquished the regulatory process to the regulated industries, it appears that way from the inside as well. The week before the new mining rules were finalized, Vice-President Dick Cheney's energy task force reluctantly handed over the unexpurgated records of its internal correspondence. (Two groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Judicial Watch, had sued the Administration for the records under the Freedom of Information Act.) "If you were King, or Il Duce, what would you include in a national energy policy, especially with respect to natural gas issues?" one e-mail sent by a staff member to a natural-gas-industry lobbyist asked. Several high-level E.P.A. officials have recently quit the agency, citing the impossibility of doing their jobs. "The E.P.A. is in the back seat, or maybe even riding the bumper, and the energy industry is having a field day," said Eric Schaeffer, shortly after resigning as the agency's chief of civil enforcement.

It was probably to be expected that two transplanted Texas oilmen would have little sympathy for federal environmental regulation. Still, the confidence with which Bush and Cheney have moved ahead is remarkable, especially when contrasted with the record of their predecessors. Despite Al Gore's reputation as a zealot, he and Bill Clinton proposed only incremental changes in environmental policy -- rationalizing the stewardship of public lands and eliminating some of the most gaping loopholes in the nation's anti-pollution laws. Even so, Congress fought them nearly every step of the way.

President Bush has managed to undo most of the modest gains they made with almost no effort. Within months of taking office, he had scuttled new standards for arsenic ...