The 1,900 new power plants called for in U.S. President Bush's energy plan pose a big threat to air quality in places where smog is already bad, experts say. They are also concerned about moves by the Bush administration to end efforts by former President Clinton to force dozens of dirty, old coal-powered plants to install modern pollution-control equipment. Last week, the administration began a series of public hearings on its proposal to ditch the "new source review" rules that require the older plants to make the changes. Meanwhile, Vice President Dick Cheney is hitting the road this week to …

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said last week that it would sue companies that manufactured lead paint. NAACP President Kweisi Mfume described exposure to lead paint as a "civil rights issue." The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that low-income children are eight times more likely to live in homes and apartments where lead paint is a problem, and that black children are five times more likely than white children to suffer from lead poisoning. The U.S. banned lead-based paint in 1978, but activists believe paint manufacturers knew as early as the 1930s …

Congressional investigators were thwarted by the White House this week in their attempts to determine the identities of the people who met with Vice President Dick Cheney's secret energy task force. Indeed, even the names of some task force members remain unknown. The task force's influential report gave short shrift to various environmental concerns long-believed to be pressing. Who are those masked men? In a startling development, a diary entry from one of the secret task force's members was discovered near a duck blind in Delaware yesterday morning. It is reprinted below. Cheney was not returning phone calls. Dear Diary, …

Last Friday, the Boston Globe printed an angry letter to the editor from Todd Paglia of the environmental group Forest Ethics. The charge? That the Globe advertising department, without reasonable explanation, had refused to run a Forest Ethics ad critical of Massachusetts-based Staples, a major Globe advertiser, and that an ombudsman column backing the department's decision was based on embarrassingly one-sided reporting. Download a readable version of the ad. The ad contains the bold statement that 97 percent of Staples copy paper comes from clearcut forests. In his column, ombudsman Jack Thomas quoted Globe advertising division sales manager Dennis Lloyd …

Only a few things really get Americans to sit up and pay attention. Oprah's weight. Ally's hair. And a rise in the price of gasoline. The latter, coupled with lucrative campaign contributions from the energy industry, is why President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney thought that an energy plan based on new drilling from the coast of Alaska to the coast of Florida would be politically popular. What the Bush administration did not anticipate is an encouraging 21st-century trend that is fracturing the Republican Party's right wing. Americans understand that safeguarding natural assets, not exploiting them, is the new …

The Natural Resources Defense Council said it would file a lawsuit today against the U.S. EPA for ignoring a congressional deadline to have a plan in place by last Friday to reduce arsenic levels in drinking water. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said she and several other senators would file papers in support of the NRDC lawsuit. In March, the Bush administration suspended a Clinton administration rule that would have allowed no more than 10 parts per billion of arsenic in tap water, leaving in place the 1942 standard of 50 ppb. The World Health Organization recommends a standard of no …

Foreign leaders, whom the Bushies have occasionally punctured in the hopes of finding oil, continue to complain about the White House's recently released energy plan like little babies. Vice President Cheney has bravely turned their nagging on its ear, pointing out that foreigners often marry dogs and then eat them. Welcome to Cheney's America. "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue," the vice president, wearing a sober sealskin jacket, has been widely quoted as saying. "But it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." Indeed, the nation has seen Cheney's moral vigor prevail over the …