A day after President Bush flippantly excused himself from a G8 summit that failed miserably to establish new policies for addressing global warming by saying "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter," this should surprise no one:

EPA Won't Act on Emissions This Year
Instead of New Rules, More Comment Sought

The Bush administration has decided not to take any new steps to regulate greenhouse gas emissions before the president leaves office, despite pressure from the Supreme Court and broad accord among senior federal officials that new regulation is appropriate now.

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce today that it will seek months of further public comment on the threat posed by global warming to human health and welfare -- a matter that federal climate experts and international scientists have repeatedly said should be urgently addressed.

The entire article by the Washington Post is well worth the read, as it details the games the administration has been playing in order to avoid dealing with the looming global climate crisis. A Supreme Court ruling last year ordered the EPA to determine whether or not global warming is a threat to human health and welfare, but the inevitable results -- there is really only one concolusion they can reach, after all -- would have required the EPA to set federal standards to remedy the problem. Rather than provide real leadership on this dire issue, the administration has shamefully pulled every trick they could think of to delay and stall, including censoring their own scientists, suppressing official reports they themselves commissioned, and deliberately fudging data provided to them by their own experts.

Nontheless, I think there are two positives we can take away from this: 1) Even the Bush Administration can't outright deny global warming any more (as much as they'd probably like to), and the call for solutions has grown so loud that they can't ignore it, either; and 2) We're so close to the end of the disastrous Bush Administration that they can choose to run out the clock rather than deal with global warming.