Clear Skies act designed to help campaign donors pollute more

The New Yorker has a good explanation of how Bush is gutting the Clean Air act by no longer requiring owners of old power plants to upgrade them to modern standards whenever they do anything more than routine maintenance.

Citing the success of the Clean Air Act in order to justify gutting it makes, on the face of it, no sense whatsoever; if there’s any lesson here, it’s that tough pollution standards work, and that they are perfectly consistent with a robust economy. But the weakness of the President’s arguments only makes the broader message of his trip to Monroe that much plainer: nothing is going to stand in the way of the Administration’s environmental program, least of all logic.

Sigh. Via Kicking Ass.