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.