"Eight years have gone by without any meaningful, substantive action on the clean-air debate," he said. "I hope this offends everyone as much as it does me."

It certainly seemed to offend U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman, a Clinton appointee. In 2006, Friedman directly accused the Bush administration of ignoring its environmental obligations under the law to promote the interests of industry.

The case involved accusations that the EPA failed to meet a 2000 deadline set by Congress to enact rules for dozens of hazardous air pollutants.

In his ruling, Friedman appeared annoyed by the EPA's argument that it had been too busy to comply with the law. The EPA had certainly found time, the judge noted, to issue new rules that fit the Bush administration's political agenda.

"EPA currently devotes substantial resources to discretionary rulemakings, many of which make existing regulations more congenial to industry, and several of which since have been found unlawful," the judge wrote. "By all appearances, EPA's failure to promulgate the required standards owes less to the magnitude of the task at hand than to the foot-dragging efforts of a delinquent agency."

The strategy

The Bush strategy of using administrative rules to change environmental policy can be traced to the early days of the administration, according to documents and interviews with Republican political appointees.

One of the bluntest accounts of this agenda can be found in a 2001 transcript of a private presentation by electric industry lobbyist Quin Shea to utility, mining and rail executives. Shea did not know that a young trade association aide was taping his remarks, but said recently that the transcript captured the essence of what he said.

He addressed the power company executives' biggest concern. As their industry is one of the nation's largest air polluters and contributors to greenhouse gases, they realized that new regulation was inevitable. They simply hoped that Bush could ease or delay the pain.

Shea told the executives that he had just come from White House meetings, and reported that Bush intended to bypass an unfriendly Congress and use EPA administrative rules to make pro-industry changes.

The smart move, the lobbyist said, would be to take a preemptive approach - create pollution controls that would be as palatable as possible for industry.

"The president is prepared to do this administratively," Shea said, according to the transcript. "The goal here will be to gain a foothold, an irreversible foothold, on the next generation of reasonable cost-effective sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide reduction, plus air toxics, that we can all live with and that someone else can't undo."

Holmstead, the assistant administrator for air from 2002 to 2006, said that when it became clear that Congress would not cooperate with the Bush agenda, it made sense for the administration to employ administrative rules.

"We knew early on that we needed various reductions from coal-fired power plants, and that we had to deal with mercury, we had analysis that showed you could achieve a lot if you did it together at a lower cost," Holmstead said.

Environmental advocates said that Bush, Johnson and Holmstead pursued a strategy in which they would appear to improve air quality, but in reality would make incremental moves and delay substantive changes for years, if not decades.

"They have been very clever in the way they changed the debate, and were able to push the deadlines far back from where they should have been," said Bill Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies.

Looking back, Shea said in a recent interview, industry and EPA lawyers took their best shot to change the rules.

"I think they were being as aggressive and creative as they could," he said.

Humpty Dumpty world

One of the first such attempts at aggressiveness and creativity came in 2003, and led to at least two high-profile EPA resignations.