Lobbyists give money to Bush campaign. Bush gets elected. Bush impedes, rewrites, dismantles regulations that lobbyist doesn't like. Sound familiar? Sounds way too familiar to me.
Paul Krugman's latest NY Times Op-Ed is about Bush's new policies on mercury polution.
Mercury can damage the nervous system, especially in fetuses and infants -- which is why the Food and Drug Administration warns pregnant women and nursing mothers against consuming types of fish, like albacore tuna, that often contain high mercury levels. About 8 percent of American women have more mercury in their bloodstreams than the Environmental Protection Agency considers safe.
During the 1990's, government regulation greatly reduced mercury emissions from medical and municipal waste incineration, leaving power plants as the main problem. In 2000, the E.P.A. determined that mercury is a hazardous substance as defined by the Clean Air Act, which requires that such substances be strictly controlled. E.P.A. staff estimated that enforcing this requirement would lead to a 90 percent reduction in power-plant mercury emissions by 2008.
A few months ago, however, the Bush administration reversed this determination and proposed a "cap and trade" system for mercury that it claimed would lead to a 70 percent reduction by 2018. Other estimates suggest that the reduction would be smaller, and take longer...
So how did the original plan get replaced with a plan so obviously wrong on the science?
The answer is that the foxes have been put in charge of the henhouse. The head of the E.P.A.'s Office of Air and Radiation, like most key environmental appointees in the Bush administration, previously made his living representing polluting industries (which, in case you haven't guessed, are huge Republican donors). On mercury, the administration didn't just take industry views into account, it literally let the polluters write the regulations: much of the language of the administration's proposal came directly from lobbyists' memos.