Don't Look at Me: Bush's steel tariffs are indefensible. I think you're right that, as soon as the Supremes called the election for Bush, he realized he had to do something to solidify West Virginia and Michigan and Pennsylvania for 2004, since it would be statistically unlikely for him to win Florida again -- assuming, of course, that voters there can use some kind of ballot.

As for the EPA's New Source Review reinterpretation, try this piece by Jonathan Adler, in which he says:

Many of the charges against the Bush Administration's NSR reforms are simply untrue. The Natural Resources Defense Council, for instance, claims that the regulatory changes allow facilities to increase their emissions if they qualify for certain exemptions. Not so. Under the rules finalized this summer month, upgrades or repairs that increase a facility's emission potential are still required to adopt state-of-the-art pollution controls under NSR. The rule only exempts proposed repairs and modifications that will not increase emissions above permitted levels, and that also meet several other conditions designed to prevent wholesale reconstruction of facilities under the guise of maintenance and repair. The point of these changes is to facilitate modifications and repairs that enhance the safety, reliability, and efficiency (and therefore the environmental performance) of existing plants.

Since that's National Review, you'll probably bust my balls over being gullible. Fair enough: Here's Easterbrook's full argument on Bush the enviro-monster. It only mentions New Source en passant, but the gist is the same:

Taken together, Bush's three dramatic anti-pollution decisions should lead to the biggest pollution reduction since the 1991 Clean Air Act amendments.

Why is the Bush environmental record so relentlessly distorted? Because it could ruin the instant-doomsday script. Democrats are bashing the president for political reasons, just as Republicans bashed Clinton for political reasons. Environmental lobbies raise money better in an atmosphere of panic, and so they are exaggerating the case against Bush.

Here he is again last year in a speech at an energy technology seminar:

More generally, the stupidness of the current debate was on display in the synthetic furor over the new-source rule. Environmentalists were right to say that some Ohio Valley plants were evading the intent of the rule, and business was right to complain that new-source perverse incentives were the worst provisions of the otherwise highly successful Clean Air Act. But the significance of the rule was blown all out of proportion. Enviros and the media suggested the Midwest plants were causing some kind of astonishing calamity, when in fact air pollution in the Midwest and on the East Coast is in steady decline; what was really at issue in the new-source rule was not higher pollution, but the future rate of decline.

Bonus: Here's a good study, by someone who has actually read the New Source rules start to finish, which concludes that:

The disproportion between the rhetoric and the reality of air quality policy is really a measure of the disenfranchisement environmental groups fear will take place if a relatively simpler scheme of regulation is adopted--a scheme that will remove their de facto seat at the regulators' table and courthouse steps. Keep this in mind as the new round of public hearings offers mostly nonsensical noise pollution.