"Elections Have Consequences" - Updated 3/5

For this count, I do not include purely procedural or symbolic actions, such as the open-government rules or treaty signings.

1. Obama reverses Global Gag Rule, restoring funding to family-planning groups that provide abortions, including UN Population Fund in China. This will provide some incremental benefit in slowing global population growth, the second-most-powerful determinant of human impact.

2. Obama grants (pending rulemaking completion) California the right to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles. This will marginally reduce global warming, and hopefully more significantly create some momentum in the industry toward more efficient cars nationwide.

3. Interior pulls 77 pending oil leases in Utah just before BLM was to cash the checks. Keep your fucking hands off my desert. And my new idol is the kid from the U of U who walked into the bidding, passed himself off as an oil rep, and messed with the petro-prostitutes at BLM.

4. Interior slow-walks the leasing of the OCS - this is the primary east and west coast federal territory whose moratorium lapsed in 2008. Technically he didn't cancel it, but when you extend the comment period by 180 days (the easiest way to intervene in a rulemaking), the message is clear.

5. Interior suspends oil shale leasing in Intermountain West. Some leases are on the books already, as are the underlying leasing regulations, but hopefully Secretary Salazar has sent the message that the BLM is not open for business in selling the dirtiest fuels in the world.

6. FWS restores the consultation rule for the Endangered Species Act. I hope and pray we will get the word any day that BLM will by sent back to FWS for consultation on WOPR.

7. Salazar suspends the oil shale leasing, pending a new rulemaking.

8. EPA makes official finding that carbon dioxide endangers human health and welfare. Duh. This doesn't have any immediate policy effect, but it moves the policy momentum global warming so significantly that I include it here.

9. (PENDING) EPA proposes new rules for accounting for the full-lifecycle impact of biofuels, which would exclude a lot of US corn ethanol from the federal ethanol mandate. It's quite heartining that Obama's science advisors "get it" on a complex issue like this so early in the Administration.