Free Republic

When environmentalists oppose regulations that yield environmental benefits, something is afoot. So it is with the gathering furor over a possible Bush Administration upgrade of U.S. clean-air regulations. Senate Democrats Barbara Boxer and Tom Carper wrote to the Environmental Protection Agency last month expressing their "grave concern" about "this dangerous proposal." House Oversight Chairman Henry Waxman is "gravely concerned" too, about the EPA's "reckless disregard of legal constraints on its rulemaking authority." The trio and the green lobby are already shouting about "midnight regulations," the last-minute ritual at the end of every Presidency. But this rule was first proposed in...

One of the great revolutions in environmental policy has been the adoption of the "cap-and-trade" method for controlling air pollution, starting with the 1990 Clean Air Act. The basic idea is to have the government set overall limits and let the market figure out how most efficiently to achieve the goal. And it has been a major success: Over the past 35 years U.S. energy consumption has increased by 48%, and population by 42%, while emissions of the six most common pollutants have decreased by 53%. Yet that achievement is now threatened by federal, state and private lawsuits asking the...

President Bush doesn't talk about new-source review very often. In fact, he has mentioned it in a speech to the public only once, in remarks he delivered on Sept. 15, 2003, to a cheering crowd of power-plant workers and executives in Monroe, Mich., about 35 miles south of Detroit. It was an ideal audience for his chosen subject. New-source review, or N.S.R., involves an obscure and complex set of environmental rules and regulations that most Americans have never heard of, but to people who work in the power industry, few subjects are more crucial. Advertisement The Monroe plant, which is...

The Bush administration has filed a lawsuit charging that a Kentucky utility violated the Clean Air Act when it upgraded two coal-fired powerplants without obtaining a permit or installing advanced pollution-control technology. The case concerns the "New Source Review" requirements under the clean air statute. Those provisions mandate that electric utilities or industrial companies must add pollution-control equipment when they modify their plants. There has been a loud, long debate over NSR, and how large a plant modification should trigger the cleanup technology. In the suit, filed Jan. 28 by the Justice Dept. on EPA's behalf, the government alleges that...

<p>The Environmental Protection Agency may not have noticed, but last weekend was the unofficial start of summer. If it doesn't get around to issuing its new clean-air rules soon, Memorial Day may mark the start of another season of unnecessary blackouts and high gas prices. The regs have been ready for more than six months but the Bush Administration is refusing to act, for fear of being blasted by environmentalists.</p>