The New York Times
www.nytimes.com

By DOUGLAS JEHL

January 6, 2001

With help from Western states and prominent mining and drilling industry representatives, the Republicans and their allies are drawing battle plans in the hopes of blunting or reversing much of what President Clinton has sought to accomplish in a blizzard of last-minute orders on environmental policy.

Those orders included new rules announced today that would put millions of acres in national forests off limits to development.

Well beyond that, the Republicans and industry groups intend to pursue avenues resolutely blocked by the Clinton administration, most important by seeking to open federally owned land in Alaska and other Western states to oil drilling, mining, logging and other activities.

In Washington today, President- elect Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said Mr. Bush would closely review "each and every" last- minute order that Mr. Clinton issues.

None of the orders could be reversed by Mr. Bush unilaterally, and the task of seeking a reversal in Congress could prove time consuming. As Republican lawmakers monitor the path of the lawsuits challenging Mr. Clinton's authority on several fronts, some members of Congress and industry officials expect the Bush administration to appoint officials at the Justice Department and other agencies who would coordinate a full-throttled attack against the last-minute Clinton environmental measures.

Some fights have already been joined in the courts, including a lawsuit by the Mountain States Legal Foundation, where Gale A. Norton, Mr. Bush's choice to become interior secretary, began her legal career. The organization, based in Denver, has filed a lawsuit challenging Mr. Clinton's unilateral designation in the past year of more than half a dozen new national monuments.

In his own public comments, Mr. Bush has been cautious when it comes to the environment, emphasizing the importance of striking a balance between conservation and economic development. But in laying plans for the future, his transition team is reaching out most directly to the industries and activists who felt most aggrieved by Mr. Clinton's tenure, and who have made clear that there is much that they want to see undone.

A list of the 38-member advisory group on Interior Department issues provided by a Bush transition official reads in part like a who's who of representatives of affected industries, and includes W. Henson Moore, a former deputy secretary of energy who is now chairman of the American Forest and Paper Association, the representatives of various mining and energy trade groups, and top officials from companies like General Electric.

"It's very clear that the extractive industries were out of favor with the old administration," said Jack Gerard, the president of American Mining Association and a member of a Bush advisory group, who said he looked forward to the departure of a Clinton administration consumed by "an extreme ideology that drove extreme solutions."

Representative James V. Hansen of Utah and Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska, the new Republican chairmen of the Congressional natural resource committees, both vowed today to subject Mr. Clinton's forest-protection plan to review, with an eye to overturning it in the Congress if the federal courts do not do so first.

Republicans objected most vigorously to the portion of the administration's road ban that extended protection to the sprawling Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which had been excluded from earlier proposals in deference to Republican concerns about the effect on the timber industry there.

Some Democrats and environmental groups are so alarmed at the prospect of big reversals that they are scrambling to head off the emerging Republican efforts, first by trying to block Ms. Norton's nomination. "Clinton and Gore were like the goalies who stopped nearly every shot to weaken environmental protection, and now those goalies have been pulled," said Daniel J. Weiss, the political director of the Sierra Club.

Even before Mr. Bush takes office, the early wrangling has begun to elevate the environmental arena to the status of an important battleground in a contest over the direction a Bush White House will take.

In a letter to Mr. Bush, Representative Hansen offered an ambitious eight-page agenda for action, recommending that the new administration make it a priority "to correct the misguided direction the Clinton administration has taken in their attempt to manage our natural resources."

But another Republican, Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York, was among those who cautioned against giving too much credence to the calls for any kind of upheaval on the environment. "The Congress is a pretty centrist institution these days in both the House and the Senate," Mr. Boehlert said, "and you're going to see resistance to any significant change in direction."

Many Republicans are watching the lawsuits as they wend their way through federal courts, hoping that rulings on whether Mr. Clinton exceeded his authority will bolster their cause. The mining association, headed by Mr. Gerard, filed suit last month in an attempt to block an Interior Department rule due to take effect on Inauguration Day that would guarantee any future interior secretary a veto over mining activity even when it had Congressional approval.

Among Mr. Bush's other advisers, Mark Rubin, a top official of the American Petroleum Institute and a member of the group advising the transition team, many are particularly eager to see the forest-protection plan undone because it would bar the oil industry and others from getting access to the vast areas of public lands that Mr. Clinton is seeking to protect from development.

In the courts, the challenges to Mr. Clinton's recent orders — including one by the State of Idaho to the forest-protection plan — could get a boost if Mr. Bush's appointees at the Justice Department decide not to defend Mr. Clinton's work.

For his part, Mr. Bush has signaled that a priority will be to move ahead on an energy policy that would give energy companies more freedom to explore for oil and gas in the United States. In that effort, his biggest task would be to win Congressional approval for a plan to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, a goal that Republicans have pressed since the late 1980's but one that some experts say is within reach if Mr. Bush stays attentive to the mission.

"I'd be very surprised if you see any major effort from the White House to roll back what the Clinton administration has done," said Jerry Taylor, director of natural resources at the Cato Institute, a research and advocacy group in Washington that is opposed to most federal regulation. "But I think you'll see Bush focusing like a laser beam on opening Western lands for development, not just in Alaska."