Another rollback?

From the Washington Post

The Environmental Protection Agency issued draft regulations yesterday that would ease long-standing pollution controls on older, dirtier power plants by judging these plants by the hourly rate of emissions rather than the total annual output.

EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson said the administration is confident its recent efforts to curb harmful nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide pollution by establishing a separate cap-and-trade system will do more to clean the air than the New Source Review rule the agency seeks to modify.

Smoke and mirrors. Yeah, yeah, this new "reform" will reduce emission by 70% in 10 years blah blah, which is why industry has been lobbying for this years before Bush took office but was rejected by the EPA until now. I'm guessing that if I bothered to look into the details that this is just another case of where numbers have been fudged to give the appearance of improved standards of regulation when in fact the opposite has occurred.

*Cynical, well, yes. But you read Bush versus the Environment by Robert Devine and then see how you react to these sorts of announcements.

And it doesn't help that I came across this before seeing the Washington Post article.

Washington, DC — The National Park Service has started using a political loyalty test for picking all its top civil service positions, according to an agency directive released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Under the new order, all mid-level managers and above must also be approved by a Bush administration political appointee.

*I'd like to stress that this is of course, my opinion. I'm not in a position to comment authoritatively on the draft rules, its just that everything I know about the way this administration has operated regarding the environment leads me to be predisposed to suspect the worst out of any given policy. The reader is invited to investigate this matter for his/her self, and by all means, if anyone has any information showing that this planwill actually help the environment, let me know.