Blogger's Note: Sorry for the delay folks, nasty Trojan virus (no, nothing to do with the Pottstown mascot) in my home laptop made The Thin Green Line very thin reading over the past couple of days. But enough about me.

How about that George W. Bush administration huh?

Remember way back when in 2000 when he said on the campaign trail that he would regulate carbon dioxide as an air pollutant, and then 12 seconds after being sworn in changed his mind?

Well, in case you haven't noticed, things haven't changed much in the ensuing eight years.

Remember when "Clear Skies" was unveiled with as much fanfare and pomp as it lacked in content and effectiveness?

Well, see previous answer.

The most aggressive aspect of that made for television initiative, the Clean Air Interstate Rule, was thrown out Friday by a federal appeals court in Washington D.C.

According to this article in The Washington Post, "the rule represented the Bush administration's most aggressive action to clean the air over the next two decades. The EPA estimated that the rule would help prevent 17,000 premature deaths and reduce levels of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides by as much as 70 percent by 2025. An unusual alliance of power companies and environmental groups supported the measure. "

An unholy alliance of other interests including, (????!!) North Carolina, challenged it in court.

"Our air isn't getting any healthier as we battle new clean air regulations in the courts and Congress continues to stall in passing strong clean air legislation," Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate clean air and nuclear safety subcommittee, said in one of those hard-hitting prepared statements senators love so much.

The primary beneficiaries of the rule would have been those of us who breath air in the eastern and mid-western states.

But there's a silver lining in a court decision would have prevented 17,000 premature deaths because as this article in the San Francisco Chronicle points out, despite the ever-rising cost of keeping a person alive, over the past dozen years, the federal government has been steadily decreasing the value of a human life.

Seriously! I'm not making this up.

"The value of a 'statistical life' is $6.9 million in today's dollars, the Environmental Protection Agency reckoned in May — a drop of nearly $1 million from just five years ago," the Associated Press reported.

Now if you were going to guess how this could occur when nothing about living is getting any less expensive, you have to think like a bureaucrat, specifically, particularly one opposed to regulations. Sound like any vice president you know?

Given reports about all the deep down regulation changes that have been overseen by Darth
Cheney's office in the last seven years, the answer becomes obvious.

This is how AP described it: "When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.

I mean I know the little people don't mean much to Dick and his big oil pals at Halliburton, but to actually memorialize it officially in government statistics, it's breath taking. If only we could have applied that kind of thoroughness to war planning.

But I digress. Back to devaluing our lives.

"Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted," wrote the AP.

And, in the category regulations that won't be adopted, let us view with alarmed amusement, this particular piece of wisdom from the Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA spent months and money to put together a 588-page examination of the issues of greehouse gas, which found that "such gases could cause disastrous flooding and drought and affect food and water supplies," according to this article in the Los Angeles Times.

Then, in its Orwellian wisdom, the EPA refused to adopt its own staff's findings.

Why?

The ever-impartial White House provides the answer. Those regulations, which the Supreme Court had ordered last year by the way, "would impose crippling costs on the economy," according to The White House.

And how might we determine that the costs outweigh the benefits? One way might be to drive down the statistical value of human life. Irony of ironies, this has the added benefit of driving down the actual value of our lives, no statistics required It's two ironies for the price of one. Too bad we're paying the price.

And just to add a sprinkling of insult to the irony icing, one staffer who worked on the report said the administration has added a new outrage to its practice of ignoring experts who say things they don't want to hear.

It seems agency staffers did not have a chance to respond to other agencies' criticism of the report. "How do you respond to comments you've never even seen?" he asked the Times.

The bureaucratic result of the EPA's decision to seek public comment on rules it has no intention of adopting is that the public comment period will end squarely in the term of the next president.

Set and match.

Add the fact that Bush returned from the G8 summit with no binding commitment to cut emissions with the revelation that Cheney's office "had worked to alter sworn congressional testimony provided by a federal official in January to play down global warming and head off regulation of greenhouse gases," as the Times reported, and you might start to get the idea that this administration is (SPOILER ALERT!) not so serious about confronting global warming, and might, just might, be actively and quietly undermining efforts by others.

SURPRISE!

I know, I know, with all they've done so far to protect us, who could have guessed?

But that's just the kind of plot twist we've come to expect from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Is it 2009 yet?