By Stephen Leahy
IPS - Inter Press Service News Agency
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Dec 1 (IPS) - As the world community meets in Poland this week to find solutions to the climate crisis, the George W. Bush White House is chaining the United States' tiller to prevent a change of course by President-elect Barack Obama by passing new anti-environmental rules and regulations at a furious pace.
Nearly a million hectares of public wildlands in Wyoming and Utah are being opened up to oil shale extraction, the Endangered Species Act is being gutted, as are regulations regarding factory farm operations, the Clean Air Act, and removing mountaintops to dig for coal and more, said a coalition of environmental groups.
"There are many last-minute changes and some are draconian," said Josh Dorner of the Sierra Club, an environmental NGO.
The White House can make such changes arbitrarily without approval or consultation with Congress, the Senate or the public. Known as "midnight regulations", more than 60 were passed in November with the intent of tying the hands of the Obama administration.
Some of these will be difficult to reverse, but many of the worst ones will almost certainly be overturned by Obama, Dorner told IPS.
There will be an entirely new atmosphere in the White House in 2009, says a coalition of 29 leading environmental and conservation groups. They met with the Obama transition team last week and presented a 345-page "roadmap for presidential action on economic stimulus, energy, climate change, and other pressing environmental issues".
"The new administration's priorities on energy, the economy, and the environment jibe well with our roadmap," said Margie Alt, executive director of Environment America.
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"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained." -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
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