The Bush administration is unhappy about a new ad campaign attacking its plan to move some 30 tons of plutonium from Colorado to South Carolina for temporary storage. The campaign was launched last week by South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges (D), who opposes the plan, fearing that his state could become the permanent resting grounds for the radioactive waste. The feds have declined to guarantee that that won't happen, so Hodges has taken his case to the airwaves, asking South Carolinians to tell the U.S. Department of Energy to store the waste ... somewhere other than South Carolina. The DOE …

A federal judge ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers yesterday to stop allowing coal companies to deposit tons of dirt and rock from their mountaintop-removal mining operations into streams and valleys. U.S. District Judge Charles Haden II in Charleston, W.Va., also said a move by the Bush administration last Friday to make the "valley fills" legal violated the Clean Water Act. He wrote in his decision, "The agencies' attempt to legalize their long-standing illegal regulatory practice must fail. ... The regulators' practice is illegal because it is contrary to the spirit and the letter of the Clean Water Act." …

The U.S. House voted 306 to 117 yesterday to move forward with the Bush administration's plan to store the nation's nuclear waste under Nevada's Yucca Mountain. The overwhelming vote -- which overrode the veto of the plan by Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn (R) -- was expected. Now the battle moves to the Senate, where Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Majority Whip Harry Reid (D-Nev.) have promised to derail the plan, despite long odds. Opponents argue that the science in support of the plan is faulty, that the feds have misled citizens on nuclear issues many times in the past, …

John Suarez, the Bush administration's pick for the job of enforcing the nation's environmental laws, used to work closely with U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Whitman, back when she was governor of New Jersey. Trouble is, that appears to be about his only qualification for enforcing EPA rules. That was the concern expressed by Democratic members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, who saw Suarez's nomination as another indication of President Bush's lack of commitment to upholding strict environmental laws. Suarez spent three years as commissioner for New Jersey's Division of Gambling Enforcement and seven as an assistant U.S. …

Now that France has re-elected President Jacques Chirac over anti-immigrant, anti-social protection, anti-environment Jean-Marie Le Pen, the attention of the European Union has shifted toward Germany, where general elections will be held in September and an equally strong rightward lurch is feared. To help prevent that shift, Germany's Greens spent the weekend outlining policies to battle resurgent conservative currents and restore their status as the nation's third-ranking party. The Greens hope to capture 8 percent of the vote in September by drawing attention to their commitments to phase out nuclear power, raise energy taxes, and expand use of renewable energy …

The Washington, D.C., headquarters of the AFL-CIO, which represents 13 million workers in the United States, is on 16th Street just a couple of blocks north of the White House. On the morning of Sept. 11, some of the U.S. environmental movement's most influential leaders -- John Adams and Robert Kennedy, Jr., of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Carl Pope and Dan Becker of the Sierra Club, and John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff during the Clinton administration -- were assembled in the federation's executive conference room awaiting the arrival of its president, John Sweeney. Their purpose: …

Speaking of the blue-green alliance, a coalition of labor and environmental groups, plus the trucking industry, filed suit yesterday to prevent the U.S. government from allowing some 30,000 Mexican trucks onto American roads. On Friday, the Bush administration is scheduled to sign regulations that would allow Mexican trucks to cross the border for the first time in 20 years. The coalition contends that doing so would increase air pollution from diesel fumes and violate the Clean Air Act, which prevents the federal government from taking any action that would increase air pollution in regions that do not meet air-quality standards, …

In an unprecedented act, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced yesterday that it would suspend work on about 150 congressionally approved water projects to review the economics used to justify them. The move follows last week's decision by the Corps to suspend its deepening of the Delaware River to review the economic analysis, one of many that had come under increasingly vocal criticism from within and without the Bush administration. Now billions of dollars worth of other projects -- as much as a fifth of the Corps workload -- will come to a halt, in some cases indefinitely. The …

President Bush rejected a U.S. EPA proposal that would have gone much further toward improving air quality than his pet Clean Skies Initiative, according to administration documents. To cite just one example, the EPA proposal would have limited sulfur dioxide emissions to 2 million tons per year by 2010; by contrast, the (so-called) Clear Skies plan would limit such emissions to 3 million tons per year by 2018. The White House claimed the EPA plan was unrealistic, but critics say it was rejected because it imposed too many restrictions on the energy industry. Bush continues to maintain that his plan …

It's one thing for lobbyists to ply governmental officials with policy requests (that's what they do); it's another thing for government officials to actively seek input from lobbyists when crafting national policy. But apparently, in the Bush administration, that's what officials do: According to Energy Department documents (released following a lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council), a top official emailed a leading gas industry lobbyist in March 2001 to ask for help in shaping energy policy. The email reads, in part, "If you were King, or Il Duce, what would you include in a national energy policy, especially with …