Bush has made more than 50 policy changes on environment
 
 BY SETH BORENSTEIN
 Knight Ridder Newspapers
 
 WASHINGTON - Halfway into his four-year term, President Bush has
 significantly altered the nation's environmental policies, often
 without attracting much notice.
 
 A handful of his most controversial policies have made headlines,
 notably his abandonment of an international treaty on global
 warming, approval of a federal dump for nuclear waste at Yucca
 Mountain in Nevada and his proposal to drill for oil and gas in the
 Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
 
 But Bush's administration has slipped a number of major policy
 changes under the public's and the media's radar by quietly issuing
 executive orders that don't require congressional approval, making
 announcements late on Fridays, rewriting highly technical
 environmental regulations and muzzling dissent within the
 administration.
 
 Knight Ridder asked three dozen experts in the
 environmental-protection and business communities to assess the
 administration's environmental record at midterm. They cited more
 than 50 major changes in policy, including:
 
 * Dramatically stepping up drilling for oil and natural gas on public
 land.
 
 * Loosening environmental restrictions on logging and mining on
 federal property.
 
 * Easing rules that require environmental impact assessments before
 thinning national forests, starting certain military activities such
 as bombing practice and building major transportation projects such
 as airports or highways.
 
 * The Bush administration is cleaning up 31 percent fewer Superfund
 sites per month than the Clinton administration did, and polluters
 are paying 64 percent less in fines per month than they did during
 the late 1990s, according to a Knight Ridder analysis of settlements
 published in the Federal Register.
 
  * Rejecting a worldwide treaty to curb global warming and pushing a
 comprehensive energy plan that stresses reliance on fossil fuels,
 which cause global warming and air pollution.
 
 * Proposing to weaken the cornerstone air and water pollution laws
 enacted in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
 
 * Proposing to slash air pollution from power plants by 70 percent
 and to limit diesel engine emissions.
 
 Environmental-protection groups and many ecologists call the Bush's
 record deplorable. "The administration has been like carbon
 monoxide, hard to detect and deadly with respect to the
 environment," said David Wilcove, a Princeton University ecology
 professor.
 
 Business interests, conservative think-tank experts and
 administration officials argue that the president's approach brings
 refreshing innovation while cutting back excessive regulation.
 
 "Environmentalists have expected the worst from the outset," said
  James Huffman, the dean of the Lewis and Clark Law School in
 Portland, Ore. "The administration does deserve credit for
 challenging some of the unfounded and ill-supported environmental
 orthodoxy rooted in extreme caution, uncertain science and a rigid
 reliance on command and control regulation."
 
 Many experts who are considered moderates - including some former
 Republican environmental officials who served the president's
 father, former President George Bush - are more restrained but voice
 disappointment.
 
 The administration "has been negative toward the environment," said
 Russell Train, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency and
 the Council on Environmental Quality for Republican Presidents Nixon
 and Ford. He co-chaired Conservationists for Bush in 1988. "That's
 what you hear all the time, relaxing this regulation, that
 regulation."
 
 The administration has embraced "a new way of thinking that is
 results-oriented," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. "It's
 based on working in a cooperative way . . . . Environmental
 protection and economic growth can go hand in hand."
 
 Many industry representatives are well placed to influence
 environmental policy. More than two dozen political appointees have
 backgrounds in the energy, chemical, timber, agribusiness and mining
 industries.
 
 According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, the oil
 and gas industry gave nearly $17 million to Republicans in 2002 and
 $1.9 million to the Bush campaign. The forestry industry gave $3.2
 million to Republicans in 2002 and nearly $300,000 to Bush's
 campaign.
 
 The administration's environmental policies can be grouped into five
 categories: changing fundamental laws; rolling back Clinton
 administration policies; making new proposals; altering the rules
 governing the use of federal lands; and coping with global warming.
 A review of its record in each category follows.
 
 CORNERSTONE ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS
 
 In the past year, the administration has proposed altering the
 nation's three fundamental anti-pollution laws or changing the way
 they're administered. The three are the Clean Air Act of 1970, the
 Clean Water Act of 1972 and the National Environmental Policy Act of
 1969, and most experts say the changes would weaken the laws.
 
 In late November, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency
 permitted more than 17,000 old coal-fired utilities, oil refineries
 and other factories to expand or renovate without installing
 pollution-control equipment, as the agency previously had required.
 
 Another major change - an attempt to thin fire-prone forests and to
 speed construction of highway and airport projects - would weaken
 the 1969 law that requires the government to file
 environmental-impact statements before such projects can proceed.
 
 That proposal requires congressional approval.
 
 Earlier this month, the administration issued rules that would
 remove up to 20 million acres of isolated wetlands from federal
 protection under the Clean Water Act.
 
 The EPA also rewrote the definition of what legally can be dumped in
 waterways as "fill" material to include waste from mines and other
 sources. A federal judge called that decision "an obvious
 perversity" of the 1972 Clean Water Act.
 
 REPEALING CLINTON RULES
 
 Toward the end of its eight years in power, the Clinton
 administration issued a flurry of environmental regulations that
 some considered booby traps for Bush. The new president postponed,
 repealed or reduced many of these regulations.
 
 Clinton's last-minute maneuvers helped produce the Bush
 administration's first environmental stumble. After EPA
 Administrator Christie Whitman halted a Clinton rule reducing the
 amount of arsenic allowed in drinking water, a public uproar forced
 her to reinstate it.
 
 Another Clinton rule called for phasing out snowmobile use in
  Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, starting this winter.
 
 The Bush administration canceled that rule, proposing instead to
 allow up to 1,100 snowmobiles a day in both parks combined. On an
 average day, about 840 snowmobiles total thunder through the parks,
 and the number reaches 1,650 on busy weekends.
 
 The Bush administration also canceled a Clinton rule preventing
 companies that cause "significant irreparable harm" from mining any
 more public land.
 
 The Bush Department of Energy replaced a Clinton rule requiring new
 air conditioners to be 30 percent more efficient with one that
 requires only 20 percent improvement.
 
 TAKING THE INITIATIVE
 
 The administration has proposed several initiatives that promise to
 clean the environment in nontraditional ways. Most dramatic is the
 Clear Skies proposal to cut emissions from all power plants by 70
 percent by 2018. Mimicking a pollution credit-trading system that
 
 cut acid rain in the 1990s, the president's plan would cap overall
 emissions and allow more efficient utilities to trade rights to
 pollute with less efficient ones, so long as the cap is met.
 
 The administration also greatly increased funding to clean up
 industrial "brownfields," or waste sites in urban areas, and
 proposed a modest improvement in gas mileage standards for sport
 utility vehicles, a move environmentalists criticized as too little
 but which was the first hike in fuel economy standards since 1975.
 
 In addition, Bush's EPA has taken modest steps to reduce soot
 emissions from diesel engines, which experts say is probably the
 nation's biggest air-pollution problem.
 
 FEDERAL LAND USE
 
 The president's energy policy emphasizes drilling for oil and
 natural gas on public lands. Congress has not approved the
 most-noted proposal, for oil drilling in the Arctic National
 Wildlife Refuge.
 
 Drilling and prospecting for minerals increased dramatically in 2001
 on federal land in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Montana.
 Oil rigs towered over the outskirts of national parks such as
 Canyonlands and Arches in Utah.
 
 In addition, while the administration bought out an oil company's
 leases to prevent it from drilling off Florida's coast, it still
 favors drilling for oil off California's shores.
 
 Other initiatives have made it easier for the mining industry to get
 minerals from federal lands and for the timber industry to take
 trees from federal forests.
 
 GLOBAL WARMING
 
 The administration's most controversial decision - abandoning the
 Kyoto Protocol, which would require the United States to reduce the
 "greenhouse gas" emissions that contribute to global warming - was
 more symbolic than substantive. The Senate had rejected the treaty
 97-0 in a nonbinding resolution in 1997, so it was already dead.
 
 In a related step with greater consequences, Bush reneged on a
 campaign pledge to reduce power plant emissions of carbon dioxide
 
 and three other pollutants. Carbon dioxide is the leading cause of
 global warming.
 
 The administration has opposed Senate proposals to regulate carbon
 dioxide, including a new bipartisan one sponsored by his political
 rivals Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn.
 Instead, the Bush administration has promoted voluntary efforts to
 curb greenhouse gas emissions and has supplied money for research
 and technology. Most environmental groups and scientists call this a
 do-nothing approach; Bush's supporters say it avoids penalizing the
 U.S. economy.
 
 RESULTS
 
 It will take years to determine whether the president's policies
 result in cleaner air, land and water.
 
 Early indicators showed an increase in polluted waterways from 2000
 to 2001, though it could be due to better monitoring. Smog
 violations rose slightly from 2000 to 2001, then increased by more
 than 30 percent in 2002. The increases in smog are partly due to
 abnormally warm weather.
 
 In 2001, the United States reduced its emissions of gases that lead
 to global warming for the first time in a decade. The Energy
 Department officials attributed the reduction to the sluggish
 economy.
 
 
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