Courts Deal Setbacks To Bush Environmental Policies

WASHINGTON — Lawyers who have the job of defending President Bush's environmental policies have had it rough this year.

The Supreme Court's ruling Monday that the Environmental Protection Agency must consider regulating greenhouse gases in automobile exhaust was one of a series of recent setbacks to administration policies.

Policies dealing with logging in national forests, mountaintop removal, coal mining and the fate of endangered species have been vacated by federal judges or modified by the government to settle federal lawsuits.

"The president either has some pretty terrible lawyers or some pretty terrible policies. I think it's the latter," said Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, a nonprofit activist organization.

The global warming rule has a direct bearing on efforts by the state of California to restrict carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from auto tailpipes.

The state passed a law requiring cars sold in the state to reduce global warming emissions by nearly 30 percent by 2012. Ten other states have adopted California's tailpipe rules.

However, for the California standards to take effect, EPA must waive Clean Air Act language that gives the federal government exclusive authority to set clean air rules.

EPA spokeswoman Jennifer Wood said the agency will solicit public comments on California's waiver request.

She said this is the next step in a review process that was underway before the Supreme Court decision.

But environmentalists said the decision will make it hard for EPA to turn down the California request.

"The high court's clear and unambiguous decision put the Bush administration on notice that it could no longer put politics ahead of science and the law at EPA," said Dan Becker, head of the Sierra Club's global warming program.

Lawyers for the Army Corps of Engineers were meeting Thursday in Huntington, W.Va., with environmentalists and coal companies to discuss the latest ruling involving the administration's handling of mountaintop removal mining.

In a decision issued March 23, U.S. District Judge Robert Chambers declared that the corps was required to make full "environmental impact assessments" before approving permits for four huge mining operations.

Mountaintop removal mining involves cutting off the top of a mountain to get to coal veins and putting the waste in adjacent valleys.

One of the permits issued by the corps would result in 73.9 million cubic yards of waste material being dumped onto mountain valley creeks, the judge noted. Mining companies had proposed — and the corps had approved — carving out ditches and settling ponds to replace miles of destroyed creeks and streams.

But the court ruled that before the corps could approve such a drastic alteration of nature, it was required to make detailed environmental impact studies.

Corps spokesman David Hewett said the 89-page decision "is extremely complicated and we are reviewing it."

At the U.S. Forest Service, spokesman Joe Walsh said two recent court decisions are under review.

In one, a judge in San Francisco said the Bush administration's 2005 forest management rule was written without public comment or the necessary environmental impact studies.

The rule gave national forest directors greater authority in approving use of the resources — for mining, logging, recreation or other activities.

In a second ruling, a federal judge in Seattle declared that the administration had illegally suppressed and even distorted views of government scientists when it drew up a plan for logging on 24 million acres of federal lands in Washington, Oregon and northern California.

Among other failings, said Judge Ricardo S. Martinez, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management had not considered warnings such as one by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists who expressed "great concern" that the logging plan would weaken protection for salmon and other aquatic species.

In another retreat, the Forest Service agreed Wednesday to abandon nine planned timber sales in Alaska's huge Tongass National Forest in order to settle lawsuits by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, and Earthjustice.

"This one's huge," said Jared Saylor, a spokesman for Earthjustice.

Logging in the 17-million-acre Tongass has been at the center of a struggle between environmental groups and timber interests for years.

A federal appeals court had ruled that in order to justify logging in roadless areas of the forest, the Forest Service had exaggerated demand for timber from the forest.

The Interior Department formally announced on Jan. 9 that it would take a year to consider whether to list the polar bear as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act.

The Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson, Ariz., environmental group, had petitioned for the designation in February, 2005, and submitted scientific evidence that melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean was destroying the bear's habitat.

Joined by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace, the group sued the department later that year for failing to respond to the petition.

To settle the suit, the department agreed to formally consider the petition and spend 12 months studying the animal's condition and taking public comment.

If the polar bear joins the list of 460 plants and animals on the department's "threatened" list, the impact on activities that increase global warming could be dramatic.

"This will essentially declare 'open season' for environmental lawyers to sue to block virtually any project that involves carbon dioxide emissions," the Western Business Roundtable, an organization of companies that mine or burn coal, has warned.