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Democrats brace for ‘midnight rules’ from Bush
Mark Clayton, The Christian Science Monitor
White House hastens to put new regs in place – and out of Obama’s reach, watchdogs say.
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Will last-gasp “refinements” to the Clean Air Act let power plants locate near national parks next year? Will a new federal rule allow coal-mining debris to be dumped closer to streams? Will factory farms soon get a pass on reporting hazardous chemical releases?
So goes the worry list of environmentalists awaiting what they suspect may be an avalanche of last-minute “midnight rules” by the Bush administration that favor industrial polluters by relaxing or undermining environmental standards.
It has become a rite of outgoing presidents to push through, in their final weeks, federal regulations they favor to extend their policies beyond their administrations. Once such a rule is formally enacted by being printed in the Federal Register, the law usually requires another 30 to 60 days to pass before the rules take effect. After that, a rule can be very difficult to reverse.
(25 November 2008)
Bad Economy Threatens Obama’s Climate Fix (text and audio)
Elizabeth Shogren, NPR
Many environmental activists, scientists and business leaders worry that a recession and two wars will force President-elect Barck Obama to put his ambitious plans to tackle global warming on the backburner.
Obama reiterated his campaign pledge at a governors conference on climate change last week.
“We’ll establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 level by 2020, and reduce them an additional 80 percent by 2050,” he said in a video message that aired during the event.
No one seems to doubt his commitment, but experts caution that keeping this pledge would be very challenging in good times and that the country’s economic troubles make it much harder.
(25 November 2008)
Naomi Klein points out in The Shock Doctrine points out how special interests use emergency situations to advance their agendas. Seems to be the case here. More in the same vein from the NY Times:
Slump May Limit Moves on Clean Energy
White House Prods Allies to Oppose Limits on Greenhouse Gases
Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post
As the Bush administration prepares to issue its ruling on whether to limit greenhouse gases, it’s sending out a message to some of its allies: Tell us how much you don’t want us to regulate emissions linked to global warming.
Last week, the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs sent an e-mail to mayors reminding them that time was running out if they wanted to comment on the proposal the administration issued in July, which laid out how the government might curb greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. A 2007 Supreme Court decision required the Environmental Protection Agency to issue such a ruling, but the White House made it clear in its e-mail that it does not think that is a good idea.
(26 November 2008)
Left Out of the Bailout: The Poor
Mark Kukis, Time
As the roster of corporations and financial institutions on line for government bailouts seems to grow, some public policy advocates in Washington D.C. are calling on policymakers to focus more efforts on the nation’s poorest. The ranks of the destitute are growing quietly but alarmingly as much of the world focuses on troubles surrounding Wall Street. “Recent data show poverty is already rising quite substantially,” says Robert Greenstein, the executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “There is a strong potential for more hardship and destitution than we have seen in this country in a number of decades.”
Greenstein’s center released a new study on Monday projecting a sharp rise in the number of people living below the poverty line, which is roughly $21,200 annually for a family of four according to Department of Health and Human Services. An estimated 36.5 million Americans currently live below the poverty line, but those numbers will likely increase by as many as 10.3 million if current projections for the depth and duration of the recession hold true. According to the center’s analysis, the number of poor children will grow by as many as 3.3 million. And the number of children in deep poverty, those in families living on less than half the wages of the official poverty line, will climb by as many as 2 million…
(25 November 2008)
