In The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert, one of my favorite environmentalist journalists, writes about President Bush’s “midnight regulations,” rules put in place in the last three months of an outgoing presidential administration.

Among the many new regulations—or, rather, deregulations—the Administration has proposed are rules that would: make it harder for the government to limit workers’ exposure to toxins, eliminate environmental review from decisions affecting fisheries, and ease restrictions on companies that blow up mountains to get at the coal underneath them. Other midnight regulations in the works include rules to allow “factory farms” to ignore the Clean Water Act, rules making it tougher for employees to take family or medical leave, and rules that would effectively gut the Endangered Species Act. Most regulations are subject to public input; such is the sense of urgency that the Administration has brought to the task of despoliation that the Interior Department completed its “review” of two hundred thousand public comments on the endangered-species rules in just four days, a feat that, one congressional aide calculated, required each staff member involved to read through comments at the rate of seven per minute. “So little time, so much damage” is how the Times recently put it. […]

What distinguishes this Administration in its final days—as in its earlier ones—is the purity of its cynicism. White House officials haven’t even bothered to argue that these new rules are in the public interest. Such a claim would, in any event, be impossible to defend, as just about every midnight regulation being proposed is, evidently, a gift to a favored industry.

Consider, for example, the case of New Source Review. Utility companies have always hated this provision of the Clean Air Act, which requires them to install up-to-date pollution controls when they build new plants or renovate old ones. A new rule being circulated would take a trick that the power company Duke Energy dreamed up for circumventing New Source Review and turn it into law. According to the Administration’s own estimates, this new anti-rule would allow an additional seventy million tons of CO2 to be released into the atmosphere each year. “If you thought the first hundred days of the Bush Administration were bad, just wait and see what the last hundred could bring,” Representative Edward Markey, of Massachusetts, has warned.