By Barbara KesslerGreen Right Now
What happens when regulation takes a holiday? Financial institutions run amok, industry encroaches on national parks, endangered wildlife is left in the lurch, and apparently, too, the nation’s water is put at risk.
This week, two Congressional leaders, Henry Waxman, (D-Calif.) and James Oberstar (D-Minn.) unveiled the results of their joint investigation into the Clean Water Act, which shows that there has been a recent, dangerous lack of enforcement of the Clean Water Act.
In a letter to President Elect Barack Obama, the two lawmakers explained that since a 2006 Supreme Court decision narrowed the scope of the Clean Water Act, making it more difficult to assemble a case against clean water violators, hundreds of enforcement actions have been stalled or sidelined.
All told, the report discovered that some 500 potential clean water cases have been dropped or put on hold since the court’s ruling in Rapanos v. United States, a case that asked whether certain wetlands that empty into a river in Michigan were subject to federal clean water protections. That decline in enforcement represents roughly a halving of enforcement actions.
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Chinese Company Awarded by EPA for Turning Waste to Energy
By John DeFore
There may be a few billion reasons to worry about the environmental impact caused by rapid development in China and India, but one Chinese company has taken a green step serious enough to earn it a first-of-its-kind award from our own U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA’s Combined Heat And Power Partnership has been handing out awards to American companies since 1999, encouraging industries that use various technologies to produce both heat and electricity from a single fuel source. But it has never given one to a foreign company until now.
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Tags: · Caterpillar, Coke Gas, EPA, Gas Recapture, pollution, Shandong Jinneng Coal Gasification, Solar Turbines
Beach Bummer, NRDC Report Finds Pollution Worse On Some US Beaches
By Barbara Kessler
Before dunking yourself in the ocean for a last summer hurrah, you may want to check out the NRDC’s latest report on the state of the nation’s beaches. It found that the number of closings and advisory days along U.S. freshwater and ocean coasts was at the second highest level in 18 years of tracking, mainly due to increased pollution along the Mid-Atlantic region and Great Lakes waters.
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Tags: · beaches, pollution, runoff, Sewage
Vatican Declares Pollution A Sin
By Barbara Kessler
Thank God. It’s now officially wrong to pollute the environment. In fact, according to the Vatican, which came out with seven new categories of moral turpitude related to the “phenomenon of globalization,” it is a sin.
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Tags: · Catholics, pollution, Vatican
UCLA: Tiniest Pollutants May Be Most Heart-Harmful
By John DeFore
A study released today by researchers at UCLA holds more bad news for those concerned with the effects of auto emissions: Nanoparticles (those on the scale of a virus or molecule), which are so small they can’t be filtered by existing technology, may not simply harm our lungs — they may actually [...]
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Tags: · Cholesterol, Emissions, Nanoparticles, pollution
