Free Republic

<p>The Obama administration's chief environmental watchdog, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, is stepping down after a nearly four-year tenure marked by high-profile brawls over global warming pollution, the Keystone XL oil pipeline, new controls on coal-fired plants and several other hot-button issues that affect the nation's economy and people's health.</p>

New rules to cut carbon dioxide emissions will make it nearly impossible to build new coal power plants The Obama administration effectively blocked the construction of any new coal-fired power plants on Tuesday, introducing rules to cut carbon dioxide emissions from the next generation of plants. The proposed new standards would cut carbon dioxide emissions on new power plants in half and will, over time, help move America away from the carbon-heavy plants that currently produce nearly half of the country's electricity, Lisa Jackson, the head of the environmental protection agency, told a conference call with reporters. "Right now there...

The Obama Environmental Protection Agency just condemned to death an entire U.S. industry - a legal and scientific horror story that congressional Republicans failed miserably to prevent. The EPA’s newly proposed greenhouse gas emission standards for coal-fired power plants will be finalized by the Obama administration, win or lose, after the November election. Though the proposed standards leave alone existing coal-fired power plants, they effectively prohibit the construction of new plants by establishing an impossible-to-meet emissions standard. But don’t get the idea that the EPA threw the coal industry a bone by omitting existing coal-fired plants, as the agency has...

It is time for Lisa P. Jackson to resign. Last Friday at Howard University, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) railed against the coal industry, saying, “In [the coal industry’s] entire history - 50, 60, 70 years or even 30 - they never found the time or the reason to clean up their act. They’re literally on life support. And the people keeping them on life support are all of us.” This is patently false, of course, as emissions from U.S. coal-fired power plants are quite heavily regulated. Those emissions controls are the reason U.S. air is clean...