The Obama Administration is working to prevent and undo the Bush Administration’s efforts to weaken environmental regulations. From Business Green:

President Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel issued a memo on inauguration day warning federal agencies not to send proposed or final regulations to the Office of the Federal Register for publication. The Oval Office is to review each of them first.

The White House memo also gives the president’s designates the chance to re-evaluate rules that have already been published in the federal register, but which agencies have not yet brought into effect.

Last-minute rules, known as midnight regulations, are common when one administration leaves office. The Bush administration was working on a swathe of regulations in the run-up to the transition, many of which carried an environmental impact.

For example, on Tuesday, as president Obama took office, a rule exempting factory farms from reporting pollution emissions from animal waste came into effect. It had been finalised on 18 December.

Other rules that took effect in the previous week governed the reclassification of hazardous waste as fuel, allowing it to be burned, and the opening of two million acres of western land to leasing for oil shale development. Last Thursday, a regulation also came into effect allowing federal representatives to approve projects without considering global warming, and without consulting biological health experts about the effect on endangered species.

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