President Obama continues with Bush's "clean skies" policies :(

First came this email from Frances Beinecke, who is the President of Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC,) in which she writes "President Obama just threw you overboard:"

President Obama just dropped us like a hot potato.

It happened on Friday, without warning, when the President cozied up to America’s biggest polluters and killed life-saving ozone smog rules that his EPA has been working on diligently for years.

What stings almost as badly as the smog is this: the White House reached into the George W. Bush playbook by delivering this slap in the face on the eve of a holiday weekend -- clearly hoping that all would be forgotten by Tuesday morning.

Sorry, Mr. President. That’s not going to happen.

That was time-stamped 10:13 am on September 6th.  While I am no environment ideologue, I have been following NRDC ever since my graduate school days.  After completing my dissertation, I even interviewed for a position at their Los Angeles office.  But, I suppose it was clear to them that as much as I am sensitive to the impacts on the natural environment, I wouldn't make a religion out of environmental issues :)

Some time later, I signed up for email alerts from them, which is how I got the email from NRDC.  Anyway, a day after that email came another one:

We raised an outcry yesterday that lit up the White House switchboard all day long! Thousands of you are still trying to get through. With the President’s Thursday speech fast approaching, I want to be sure you get heard at the White House.

I agree with NRDC on this one.  Barack O'Bush wimped out, yet again :(

The Economist notes:

Polluters are cock-a-hoop—and so are the Republicans, who have become ever less verdant since the recession began. Many think that the EPA is a left-wing wrecking operation and Mr Obama’s hitherto willingness to approve its edicts characteristic of his job-killing attachment to unnecessary regulation. Besides American lungs, this ignores a few things: that the CAA was beefed up under a Republican president (Nixon); that the EPA is bound not to factor economic costs into its rulings on the CAA; and that those rulings so far approved under Mr Obama were mostly demanded by the courts, to clear up the mess made of America’s environmental regulation by Mr Bush.
Yet at least Republicans are bound to beat up Mr Obama. The scorn that greens, who are mostly Democrat, increasingly show him is a bigger threat to his re-election hopes. They cite a pattern of presidential retreat on big environmental issues, including a perceived friendliness towards the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, that would ferry Canadian crude-oil almost the length of America. Far worse, following Congress’s rejection of a cap-and-trade scheme last year, is Mr Obama’s failure to do anything much to combat climate change. By September 30th the EPA is due to propose limits on greenhouse-gas emissions for power stations. Whether green enthusiasm for Mr Obama can be reactivated—as those legal challenges to the permitted ozone limit soon will be—will depend upon his response.

When will the Republicans ever understand that Obama is one heck of a competent Republican president? As the joke goes, I hope that after winning re-election, Obama will switch parties and become a Democrat :)

As for the greens, well, Obama knows all too well that they would rather vote for him dragging their feet than vote for the likes of Rick Perry.  So, why care for the green votes, right?