To heck with the environment

We've got an election to win:

President Bush on Tuesday ordered a temporary suspension of environmental rules for gasoline, making it easier for refiners to meet demand and possibly dampen prices at the pump. He also halted for the summer the purchase of crude oil for the government's emergency reserve.

The moves came as political pressure intensified on Bush to do something about gasoline prices that are expected to stay high throughout the summer.

The emergency reserve business isn't going to do much. When Clinton released oil from it years back, the drop in gas prices was negligible. And as one conservative member of Pajama's Media wrote when Dems called for a release in May of 2004, "[r]eleasing oil from the SPR for the sole purpose of lowering gas prices is a dumb idea, plain and simple."

And you can guess who called the reserve, "an insurance policy meant for sudden disruptions of the oil supply or for war. It should not be used for short-term political gain ... at the expense of national security."

It's too obvious, isn't it?

What worries me about the ease on environmental standards is that, with a decrease in prices and without any indications that oil prices will ease long term, it will become harder and harder to justify putting the standards back in place. It's the same kind of logic used for the President's temporary tax cuts. To make them temporary at the time was sound because if nothing happened, they would automatically be repealed. But who's going to campaign later on repealing all the tax cuts? No one. The same goes for this temporary easing of environmental standards.

And who cares if you can't breathe, as long as you can drive your new Hummer where ever you want to go, right?