• What a way to leave EPA: outgoing EPA Administration Mike Leavitt released regulations allowing U.S. farmers who grow certain crops to continue using methyl bromide, a farm chemical that depletes the ozone and causes cancer. The chemical was scheduled for world-wide phase-out under the Montreal Protocol, but the new EPA regs mean a 2 million pound increase in 2005. [AP, NRDC]

• The LA Times reports on the Pentagon's efforts to exempt itself from environmental laws:

  The Defense Department, which has won congressional exemptions from environmental laws in the last two years, now wants to change an internal policy that commits the department to sound environmental practices.

  Since President Bush took office, the Pentagon has won exemptions from the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act and seeks exemption from the Clean Air Act and two toxic waste laws.

  A draft of the proposal, which would replace a 1996 directive, eliminates the Pentagon's vow to "display environmental security leadership within DOD activities worldwide." It stresses, instead, the "national defense mission."

  The new proposal replaces a list of concrete responsibilities with vague guidance to the military about how to prevent pollution and guarantee compliance with federal and international laws.

• The Wildlife Society issued a report analyzing the effects of global warming. Wildlife species are migrating in a northward direction in North America because of climate change, and this trend could result in increased extinction rates and other large-scale changes in the ecosystem.

• Devastation in Appalachia: Prominent regional environmental groups were not among those signing onto a “reforestation initiative” for strip-mined lands promoted by the federal Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), despite an OSMRE press advisory suggesting that local environmental groups would be among the signers. Most major regional environmental groups, including Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW), Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, and Save Our Cumberland Mountains in Tennessee had not even heard about the initiative until OSMRE circulated the media advisory and the statement of intent. The groups, while applauding the idea of making every attempt to re-forest already mined lands, are reiterating a call for a moratorium on any new mountaintop removal mining projects. [OVEC]

The Bush administration said Friday it will allow developers to complete construction and other projects even after belated discoveries that the work could endanger protected species.

The new rules from the Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service restore a Clinton-era initiative known as "no surprises." It will let federal agencies give blanket assurances to home builders, timber and mining companies and other developers that they won't have unforeseen requirements to protect rare species once a project has begun.

A federal judge had blocked the rules last June, telling the government it needed to hear more ideas from the public about the changes. The administration gathered the extra comment and moved ahead Friday in a victory for business over environmentalists....

Six groups led by California-based Spirit of the Sage Council, which represents some American Indians and environmentalists, had challenged the rules from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Commerce Department's National Marine Fisheries Service, which enforce the Endangered Species Act.

Eric Glitzenstein, a Washington-based lawyer for the groups, said the rules remain "a legally and scientifically bankrupt policy that can only drive species closer to extinction."

• cutting down more trees in the national forests ("thinning" them);
• doing something to the Endangered Species Act (strengthening it? yeah, that's it);
• abandoning the still-wild "roadless" lands (that is, giving states more control over them).

• Over the past several months, a divided NLRB has issued decisions that strip workers of legal protections. In November, employees of temp agencies were barred from organizing with regular employees without both employer and agency permission. Prohibitions on communications between workers expressing displeasure or anger over working conditions were ruled lawful last month, and are no longer assumed to interfere with employee free speech around union activity. In September, the NLRB determined that disabled workers who receive rehabilitative services from employers should not be classified as workers and are therefore ineligible to form unions under the protections of federal law. The agency released a similar decision in July for graduate teaching and research assistants, ruling that they are students and not employees. “We know that workers are under attack when they organize, and the government should be offering them more protection, not less,” says American Rights at Work.

• Meanwhile, also from American Rights at Work: a worker in the United States is fired or discriminated against every 23 minutes for exercising his freedom of association on the job. “Workers are under attack and most Americans don’t even know it,” says ARW. “Protecting workers’ rights to form unions is U.S. law, and a human rights standard that our country helped create.”

• The stakes are higher than ever for workers to be able to organize and to expect strong regulatory protections that ensure safe and healthy workplaces. A new report from Liberty Mutual reveals that the cost of serious workplace injuries continues to soar, even after adjusting for medical and wage inflation. In fact, over half of the 12.1 percent increase between 1998 and 2002 happened in 2002, despite a drop in the number of serious injuries over those four years.

• Just what does the Bush administration have against science? PEER has discovered that EPA censored the warnings of its professional staff about a Bush Administration plan to build more roads across national forests. EPA deleted comments about a host of environmental problems, ranging from impaired public drinking water to spreading invasive plants, from comments it submitted to the U.S. Forest Service on November 26th.

• Oh, Crap: The Environmental Protection Agency is close to issuing new guidelines making it easier for sewage authorities to dump partially treated wastewater during heavy rainfalls, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

• Making the World Safe for Waterparks: USA Today is reporting that the “Bush administration's effort to create a national database of potential terrorist targets such as dams, pipelines, chemical plants and skyscrapers is far behind schedule and may take years to finish.” According to members of Congress who have been privy to the list, “it’s a haphazard compilation that includes water parks and miniature golf courses but omits some major sites in need of security.”

• Getting Warmer?: The story in the news is that a “bipartisan” effort resulted in a task force report on greenhouse gas emissions that coincidentally mirrors the Bush administration’s proposal of a cap-and-trade program that has no real cap at all. Surprise, surprise: the “bipartisan” panel was dominated by industry interests who based their recommendations in part on outdated thinking.

• A coalition of conservation and outdoor industry groups has formally asked the Forest Service to withdraw plans to lease over 20,000 acres for oil and gas drilling in Utah's Uinta National Forest. The leasing would allow industrial development in roadless areas along the Wasatch Front that provide valuable opportunities for hiking, fishing, and hunting, as well as habitat for wildlife such as the Bonneville cutthroat trout and northern goshawk.

• The automobile manufacturers are fighting a state policy designed to protect citizens from the effects of global warming: they have filed suit against the California Air Resources Board (CARB) over CARB's rule implementing the state's vehicle global warming law.

• The automakers have also won out with a weak regulation intended to prevent whiplash. NHTSA will require vehicle headrests to be higher and closer to the head by 2008 under a safety standard, but the new rule won't require headrests in the back seat. Some safety advocates and Honda Motor Co. (HMC) wanted back seat headrests to be mandated, but other automakers and seat suppliers were opposed.

George Bush's new administration, and its supporters controlling Congress, are setting out to dismantle three decades of US environmental protection.

In little over a month since his re-election, they have announced that they will comprehensively rewrite three of the country's most important environmental laws, open up vast new areas for oil and gas drilling, and reshape the official Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

They say that the election gave them a mandate for the measures - which, ironically, will overturn a legislative system originally established by the Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford - even though Mr Bush went out of his way to avoid emphasizing his environmental plans during his campaign.

"The election was a validation of the philosophy and the agenda," said Mike Leavitt, the Bush-appointed head of the EPA. He points out that over a third of the agency's staff will become eligible for retirement over the President's four-year term, enabling him to fill it with people lenient to polluters.

First up: drilling in ANWR and more giveaways to the oil, gas, and power industries. Next up:

Far more radical measures are also under way. Joe Barton, the Texas Republican chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who is to help push through the energy bill, has also announced a comprehensive review of the Clean Air Act, one of the world's most successful environmental laws.

Environmentalists predict the emasculation of the Act, which has cut air pollution across the country by more than half over the last 30 years. Not to be outdone, the Republican chairman of the House Resources Committee, Richard Pombo, has announced a review of the Endangered Species Act, for the protection of wildlife. The law has been the main obstacle to the felling of much of the US's remaining endangered rain forest. And in a third assault, Congressional leaders have also announced an attack on the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires details of the environmental effects of major developments before they proceed.

Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, said last week that the previous Bush administration had largely contented itself with weakening environmental legislation, but the new one intended to go much further. He added: "We will now see an assault on the law which will set the US in the direction of becoming a Third World country in terms of environmental protection."

Interior Department biologists have recommended against adding the sage grouse to the endangered species list, a determination that could wind up benefiting natural gas and oil producers but add to environmentalists' concerns.

At stake is a bird whose numbers have declined to as few as 142,000, as well as the use of great expanses of Western sagebrush that provide cover and food between 4,000 and 9,000 feet elevations.

At one time there may have been as many as 16 million of the birds in the Western United States and Canada, the government estimates.

Steve Williams, director of the department's Fish and Wildlife Service, now must decide within 25 days whether to accept the biologists' recommendation and deny the bird federal protections that come from being added to the list. ...

He and Interior Secretary Gale Norton have made no secret they generally prefer to rely on private conservation work and joint efforts by federal agencies, Western states and local governments, rather than ordering new restrictions on harming wildlife or using its habitat.

"We must continue and wherever possible expand those efforts," Williams said Friday.