There's been volumes written on the SEJ listserve about the Bush Administration's (and, to a lesser extent, its predecessors) propensity for releasing bad-news environmental stories on Fridays to minimize the damage. But here's one that clearly doesn't fit the traditional mode: A Bush Administration OMB study concluding that environmental regulations, as Eric Pianin writes, are well worth the costs they impose on industry and consumers, resulting in significant public health improvements and other benefits to society.

Looking at the record during the last decade, from 1992 to 2002, the OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, headed by the controversial John D. Graham, found the health and social benefits of enforcing clean-air regulations to be five to seven times greater than costs for compliance: a $120 to $193 billion benefit compared with costs to industry, states, and municipalities of between $23 and $26 billion. The new study reverses earlier findings, now being rejected as defective.

Here's a sentence you might have thought you'd never hear attributed to OMB's Graham: In this case, the data show that the Environmental Protection Agency's clean air office has issued some highly beneficial rules. That contrasts with Graham's own views while he was at the Harvard University-sponsored risk analysis center. Not surprisingly, environmentalists see the new study as the basis for more enforcement and more stringent regulations. A National Association of Manufacturers rep reportedly is suspicious that costs to industry are, in his view, once more being underestimated. And remember: You read it (or missed it) on a Saturday!