Just weeks after capturing a second term, the Bush administration is lining U.S. environmental laws up for the worst assault in 30 years. The White House has announced heavy changes to the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, along with the re-structuring of the Environmental Protection Agency and the opening of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

The planned changes allow for greater pollution, opening protected areas of land and sea to gas and oil exploration, encouraging the building of new nuclear power plants, diminishing plant and wildlife protection and leaving the last scraps of U.S. rainforests to be cut down. Though last term's Senate was stacked against the Republican cash-before-planet mindset, the numbers are now in their favour.

National Environmental Trust president Philip Clapp calls the Bush regime's new aggressiveness "an assault on the law" and predicts the U.S. is headed "in the direction of becoming a Third-World country in terms of environmental protection."

» Scott Saxon