Is Obama With Eye On 2012 Mulling An EPA Rollback?

It looks as though President Obama may have decided that getting re-elected in 2012 is more important than saving the planet from the much-dreaded global warming. But then how does he break it to the people who helped elect him and whose support he will need in 2012? Political prognostication is always a chancy business, but a few new developments have occurred that seem to point to the president moving to rein in the Environmental Protection Agency's nascent regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions. First, the left-wing British press reported Monday about how a government shutdown may force the EPA to delay its greenhouse-gas regulation by two years. It was a novel thought because the recently passed House bill to fund the government would strip the EPA of its emissions authority altogether, while any talk of a two-year delay in EPA authority has been limited strictly to a not-so-popular coal-state/Democrat bill sponsored by Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. No one had previously linked EPA funding issues to a two-year delay. Later that afternoon, news broke that Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown wrote the president, worrying about the EPA regulations killing jobs: "Without careful consideration, the unintended consequences of imprudent regulation could ultimately undermine our shared objectives of reducing (greenhouse gas) emissions and spurring economic growth. Brown, however, isn't the only one up for re-election in 2012. So is the president, and his political survival instincts may be asserting themselves once again over his job-killing, central-planning inclinations...more