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  • Wesley Clark has some good things to say about the environment — and some things to learn

    The man of the hour. Photo: Clark for President. Days after entering the presidential race, Wesley Clark is dominating the public opinion polls — surpassing not only fellow Democratic candidates but also President Bush in approval ratings. Forty-nine percent of registered voters in the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Monday said they’d vote for Clark, compared […]

  • The Environmental Protection Agency just isn’t like it was in the good old (Nixon) days

    Mike Leavitt — how long will he be smiling? Photo: Utah governor’s office. There has been considerable adverse comment from the environmental community about President Bush’s nomination of Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt (R) to head the U.S. EPA. Most of that criticism has focused on the governor’s environmental record in Utah, a record that appears […]

  • Bush pushes his Clear Skies plan — and his electoral prospects — at a notoriously dirty power plan

    Bush talks to the masses in Michigan. Photo: White House. When President Bush set out on Monday to defend his recent New Source Review rollback and promote his energy bill and Clear Skies program, it was hard not to notice the peculiar setting he chose. Wearing a hardhat and safety glasses, the commander in chief […]

  • Hillary Clinton threatens to block Bush’s EPA nominee

    As the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks looms, the Bush administration is facing opprobrium for having deceived the American public about possible air-quality concerns at Ground Zero. Behind the scenes, the issue has become somewhat bizarrely entwined with another hot topic: the confirmation of Republican Gov. Michael Leavitt of Utah as the […]

  • Who needs Superfund when we’ve got reality TV?

    By the end of the year, only $28 million will be left in the U.S. EPA’s Superfund account. Superfund pays for the reclamation of abandoned toxic-waste sites, and $28 million barely affords a study just to figure out how to clean up one of the 1,200 deserted dumps wasting away in American communities. Money’s tight […]

  • The Farmer and the Smell

    The U.S. EPA could offer large industrial livestock farms amnesty from the federal Clean Air Act and Superfund laws, according to people involved in agency-industry talks. Rather than enforce the laws, the EPA would monitor pollution levels at roughly 30 large hog and chicken operations, a plan environmentalists and former enforcement officials say is far […]

  • West Virginia activist Julia Bonds takes on mountaintop-removal mining

    The ancient mountains of Appalachia are corrugated with deep, narrow valleys, some of them no wider than a football field. Coal-mining families, who have lived in these valleys for generations, are now being driven out of their homes by the latest innovation of the very industry that has sustained them for so many years. That […]

  • The Agency Formerly Known As the EPA

    Perhaps belying its name, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing revisions to some of its own rules in order to allow mining companies to dump dirt and rock waste from mountaintop-removal coal operations into rivers and streams. In mountaintop-removal mining, companies raze mountains to access coal veins and then dump the leftover debris into […]

  • Fuel for the City

    Seeking to control sky-high summertime fuel prices, the U.S. EPA proposed new regulations for anti-smog gasoline yesterday. The EPA has been gradually phasing in a plan to combat summer smog in densely populated areas by mandating the use of cleaner-burning reformulated gasoline (RFG). The oil industry blames that plan for high prices at the pumps […]