Stop the War on Coal Act Would Weaken Environmental Protection Russell Train, a lifelong Republican and one of the country's foremost conservationists of the last half-century, died this week at the age of 92. He served Richard Nixon as the first chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and later as administrator of the fledgling Environmental Protection Agency - helping shape landmark statutes like the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. His death serves as a reminder of the G.O.P.'s historic tradition of environmental stewardship, a tradition stretching as far back as Teddy Roosevelt, which the party has now repudiated. Within hours of Mr. Train's death, Republican leaders in the House brought to the floor a bill called "Stop the War on Coal Act, " which seeks to weaken and in some cases overturn laws and rules protecting the very things that Mr. Train stood for - clean air, clean water, a stable climate and fair effective regulation of the big polluters, including but not exclusively the fossil fuel industry. The bill (which the senate will certainly strike down) contains no new ideas. According to a database compiled by Representative Henry Waxman and the Democratic staff of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, House Republicans have voted an astonishing 302 times this year to hamstring the Environmental Protection Agency, weaken clean water and air rules, undermine protections for public lands and coastal areas, and block action to address global warming - all while seeking to make the regulatory climate as favorable as possible for the oil, gas and coal industries. The virtue of the latest bill (I use the word virtue loosely here) is that it contains just about all of those bad ideas in one place --one-stop shopping as it were, for those who haven't been keeping up with the Tea Party wrecking crew in the 112th Congress. In recent years, much to his surprise as an old Republican loyalist, but perfectly in keeping with his values, Mr. Train found himself working behind the scenes to defend the Obama administration and especially its embattled E.P.A. chief, Lisa Jackson, in her efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change. He was also a strong supporter of President Obama's most important environmental achievement so far, the agreement with Detroit to double automobile efficiency and greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles by 2025. One suspects, however, that his final years would have been much happier had he been spared the sight of his own party trashing much of what he worked for.