WASHINGTON — With a short memo on Inauguration Day, President Obama blocked plans to loosen some air quality standards and to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list. But he did not stop several other controversial, late-term environmental regulations issued by the Bush administration -- at least not yet.
The list of Bush-era environmental rules that survived includes a major tweak to the Endangered Species Act, a first step in opening Western lands to oil shale development, leases for oil and gas drilling near some national parks, and the start of a process to allow new oil rigs off the Atlantic, Gulf, Alaska and California coasts.
Obama still holds several options for changing or reversing those decisions. All carry at least some degree of difficulty -- an apparent victory for an outgoing administration that explicitly tried to finish its rule-making early enough to tie Obama's hands.
"The number of examples where they succeeded" in that effort, said John Walke, clean-air director for the National Resources Defense Council, "far exceeds the examples where they failed."
Like Bush, Obama took office and immediately froze any federal regulations that were not yet finalized. The move halted a push, announced last week, to strip the gray wolf's endangered status in the Rocky Mountains and the Midwest. It also stopped a pair of controversial air quality rules from taking effect, including one that gave greater leeway to industrial polluters and another that declined to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from oil refineries.
It couldn't stop rules that first were published in the Federal Register and had cleared a statutory waiting period before taking effect -- such as the oil shale regulations, meant to pave the way for development leases in Colorado and Utah. Also unable to be touched was a rule that allows so-called mountaintop mining to fill stream beds with leftover dirt from mineral extraction; and a rule that allows federal agencies to forgo expert advice on whether proposed projects would affect endangered species.
The memo also does not affect the decision, announced last week by the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, to begin a process that could lead to oil and gas drilling on parts of the Outer Continental Shelf. That's because the department decided only to begin taking public comments on the plan, not formal rule-making, a department spokesman said.
