An odd thing happened in Washington last Friday while President Bush was overseas and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman was engaged elsewhere: Mid-level staffers at EPA made an announcement about what was described as “historic” revisions to rules they said will reduce air pollution as they encourage the expansion and modernization of older power and industrial plants.

Critics say the Clear Skies revisions to the Clean Air Act will foul the air by allowing a wider range of plant upgrades and expansions to be considered as maintenance not subject to higher environmental standards and charge that the whole thing is a political payoff. The downwind recipients of this pollution – nine Northeast states, including Maine – filed a lawsuit without hours of this announcement, claiming this Clear Skies revision to the Clean Air Act’s New Source Review provisions will severely exacerbate the environmental and public-health damage. The upwind homes of these fossil-burning dinosaurs – the Midwestern states – cheered lustily, claiming the revision to a 30-year-old law is long overdue.

If the Bush administration sincerely believes Clear Skies will jump-start plant upgrades by exempting some 18,000 power and industrial plants from the new source review requirement that state-of-the-art pollution controls be added when plants are upgraded or expanded, it chose a bizarre way to convey its confidence. Although something of this nature had been expected since early this year, the announcement was startling in scope and – by coming so soon after the election – in timing, fueling allegations of a political payoff. Not only were the two principals conspicuously absent, the press was prohibited from taking photos of the mid-level EPA staffers who broke the news.

About that payoff allegation. It is true that the Dirty Baker’s Dozen – the 13 big electric utilities that will gain most from Clear Skies – gave Republican candidates $4.1 million in the 2002 campaigns, contributions that may very well have been made with certain expectations. They also, however, gave Democrats $1.7 million. Nobody’s hands are clean enough to be pointing fingers.

Here is the nutshell version of what Clear Skies will do. There will be higher limits for the amount of pollution that can be released because emissions can be calculated using the two highest-polluting years during the last decade, not an average of the two most recent years. It gives plants that install pollution-control equipment a 10-year exemption from additional improvements, even when production capacity is expanded and better equipment is developed. It assumes that if one pollutant is controlled, all others are as well. It relaxes the definition of “routine maintenance, repair and replacement” and adds an annual allowance for those activities so that a much wider range of investment can be undertaken without spurring enhanced pollution controls. How all this adds up to clearer skies is math at its fuzziest.

It may be that New Source Review needs some revising. There is some evidence – the continued existence of antiquated and very dirty coal-burning power plants in the Midwest – that rules designed to bring them up to higher emissions standards were so convoluted that they removed any incentive to make the investments in expanded production that would pay for improvements to decrease pollution. But Clear Skies, while streamlining the expanded production, omits the other side of the equation.

The working version of this plan, the one promoted since early this year by Administrator Whitman, called for caps on emissions in return for reforms in the permitting process, an approach she backed during her days as governor of New Jersey. She was opposed by Vice President Dick Cheney and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and she, not for the first time in administration environmental policy, lost.

Although Clear Skies can be implemented by administrative rule without the consent of Congress, there is reason to hope that a more balanced revision still can be worked out. Two of the governors suing the EPA – George Pataki of New York and John Rowland of Connecticut – have considerable clout with the administration; so, too, will Mitt Romney of Massachusetts when he takes office. The group of moderate Republican senators who have not just opposed the administration on environmental matters in the past but have worked with it to craft better policy is growing in number and geographic distribution – Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee now are joined reliably by Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, John McCain of Arizona, Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois and Gordon Smith of Oregon. The administration’s quick retreat from relaxed rules on arsenic in drinking water is an encouraging indication of what good friendly advice and strong public reaction can accomplish.

Of course, the administration did not craft Clear Skies with the intent of getting sued by nine states, endangering the solidarity it needs to benefit from its narrow Senate majority and having the easternmost one-third of Americans curse it every time they cough. These may be the unintended consequences of a bad decision. But the fact that this announcement was made with no president, no EPA administrator and no pictures clearly indicated that the administration is as every bit as ashamed of Clear Skies as it should be.