This article is a good description of what's really happening for
drilling and coal.

Bush can still make life hard for wildlife 
Last updated May 18, 2008 7:46 p.m. PT
By JOEL CONNELLY
P-I COLUMNIST
With a national poll finding that 80 percent of Americans feel the U.S.
is headed down the wrong track, even GOP nominee-in-waiting John McCain
has broken with Bush policies on energy, the environment and climate
change.
But a lame-duck administration can still make life difficult for
waterfowl and other living creatures.
The Bushies have adopted a mandarin, or arbitrary, policy on the
environment and public lands. The administration talks one way while its
actions follow the opposite path. It has eight months left to make
administrative decisions that will far outlast W's tenure in the White
House.
A classic example came in an announcement Friday by Interior Secretary
Dirk Kempthorne and the Bureau of Land Management.
The BLM said it would defer, for at least 10 years, more oil and gas
leasing around Teshekpuk Lake on Alaska's North Slope. The lake is a
breeding, molting and resting area for more than 1 million migratory
birds.
Is this a victory for conservation groups? 
Hardly. The lake's wetlands have previously been protected by, of all
people, Reagan-era Interior Secretary James Watt and the Clinton
administration's Secretary Bruce Babbitt. 
The Bush administration simply gave back protection that it had already
lifted. "If you read the BLM release, you can see some sleight of hand
going on," said Stan Senner, top guy at Audubon Alaska.
"Basically, BLM has 'opened' the entire northeast National Petroleum
Reserve -- except the bed of Teshekpuk Lake -- to oil and gas leasing,
but then has 'deferred' leasing for 10 years on the wetlands north and
east of the lake," Senner explained.
"The agency wants to move ahead with another lease sale in the fall, but
they don't want it to get bogged down in the controversy of trying to
lease formerly closed areas around the lake."
In last week's other big "green" news, Kempthorne heeded a court-imposed
deadline and officially listed the polar bear as "threatened" under the
Endangered Species Act.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had announced in January a "delay" in
the polar bear decision. During the delay, on Feb. 6, the administration
threw open 30 million acres of bear habitat to oil and gas leasing.
Chukchi Sea Oil and Gas Lease Sale 193 covered essential habitat for half
of the U.S. polar bear population. A former federal biologist warned in a
2007 memo: "Polar bear issues which have been raised have been completely
ignored by both Shell and the (U.S.) Minerals Management Service."
"Requests for critical information" on bear impacts were "repeatedly
denied," wrote biologist James Wilder, and big polar bear populations
"are likely to be greased if there is a spill."
The state of Alaska and a bevy of global warming deniers opposed any bear
listing. So, apparently, did the office of Vice President Dick Cheney,
lately involved in holding up protection of the endangered right whale.
The choice was to designate the bears as "threatened" but not do anything
to protect them.
The "threatened" listing carried no promise to treat effects of offshore
oil and gas drilling. Nor was there any pledge to cap carbon emissions,
which cause the global warming that is melting the polar ice on which
polar bears live. 
"Given that Secretary Kempthorne was under political pressure to reject a
listing, we're happy that he went through with it, but we're concerned
that the conditions he attached will hobble recovery, especially since
the conditions are designed to wave through expanded oil and gas
development in the Arctic," said David Jenkins of Republicans for
Environmental Protection.
The administration is also about to impose new air-quality rules that
will make it much easier for utilities to build power plants near
federally protected parks and wilderness lands.
It is rewriting part of the Clean Air Act applicable to "Class 1 areas"
-- public lands whose attraction depends on vistas and visibility. 
Or as Babbitt succinctly put it: "What is the Grand Canyon without views
and clean air? It's just a big ditch."
The output of coal-fired power plants, especially near national parks in
the Southwest, rises at hours of peak electrical use. Over three decades,
regulators have measured air pollution in parks in 24-hour and three-hour
increments, giving facts and figures on emissions in times of high
demand.
The new rule, working its way up through the Environmental Protection
Agency -- and opposed by many EPA staff -- would average pollution levels
over a year, so periodic high levels would not violate the law.
The proposal "would allow for significant degradation of the parks' air
quality," according to a memo from the EPA's computer modeling staff
quoted last week in The Washington Post.
One of the nation's most moderate "green" outfits, the National Parks
Conservation Association, reported that the new rule would facilitate 28
new power plants within 186 miles of 10 national parks. The parks include
Zion in Utah, Mesa Verde in Colorado and Great Smoky Mountains along the
Tennessee-North Carolina border.
Such decision-making is designed, in Senner's words, to be "clear as
mud."
If it works, such will be the air over some of our country's great
natural jewels.

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