White House to Push 'Clear Skies' Legislation

and here comes the push for advance the Rep. legislation--

......Clear Skies still faces significant Democratic opposition: Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who serves on an Appropriations panel overseeing the EPA's budget, said in an interview that Clear Skies is "a polluting bill" that is worse than current law. Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on energy and air quality, said he would "think long and hard" about whether a cap-and-trade system is appropriate for regulating mercury and nitrogen oxide.

Sens. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.) and James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.) have filed bills that would go further than Clear Skies by curbing carbon dioxide emissions and achieving steeper and faster reductions in the other three pollutants. Jeffords's bill would curb nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide pollution 75 percent by 2009, for example, while Carper's plan would obtain a 60 percent cut in the two pollutants by 2009.

"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62025-2004Dec13.html?referrer=email"

White House to Push 'Clear Skies' Legislation
EPA Rule Put on Hold as Bush Seeks Bill

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 14, 2004; Page A03


The White House plans to push Congress to retool the nation's air quality laws early next year, according to administration and industry officials.

The move has alarmed environmentalists, who fear that President Bush's "Clear Skies" proposal -- which has not moved in Congress since he unveiled it in 2002 -- would undercut existing federal standards more than the administration's pending plan to revise pollution controls through regulation. .....

Clear skies my foot.

and calls it something else...unfortunately the US public buys the sound bytes..

EPA lets refineries miss deadline - again
Associated Press

FORT WORTH -- Federal officials have quietly allowed the nation's oil refineries to miss court-ordered deadlines to reduce air emissions, prolonging the public's exposure to dangerous pollutants, a newspaper investigation has found.

Nearly every time, the Environmental Protection Agency failed to tell the courts or the public about the deadline extensions, even when legal settlements required it to do so, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported today.

Because of those extensions, the EPA's Petroleum Refinery Initiative has not achieved the air quality improvements that the agency has claimed, the newspaper found.

Under the initiative, the EPA uses legal settlements known as consent decrees to resolve decades of alleged pollution violations. In return for installing pollution controls and paying a fine, companies are immediately released from all legal liability.

Tom Skinner, the EPA's top enforcement official, touted in an October news release that settlements under the initiative have reduced emissions of air pollutants by 200,000 tons per year at 48 refineries in 24 states.

But a review of data conducted by the newspaper found the reductions actually total only about a fifth of that amount.





http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=1066254

James Connaughton. He is completely pro-industry, smart as hell, and can sell his product. He is a formidable enemy and cannot be underestimated. He will piss in your ear and tell convince you it's raining.

If we don't establish a strong, organized rally against him, he will get everything he wants.



Know him, and do not sell him short. He is very, very good at what he does.

Man, doesn't he look like he could be a thinner brother of Karl Rove???

get Tommy Middlefigger designed gas masks gratis!

* makes it SOUND legit. But anybody with enough functioning brain cells to see his history knows this is all a load of elephant spunk.

And all it will do is make things 'voluntary' and eliminating regulation. And if people haven't figured it out by now that regulation is not a bad thing, then let them breathe smog and drink lead. What's left to say? What can be done? We are tied to the bedposts, being raped by HIV-positive criminals.

It's just like No Child's Ass Left Behind.

John Ashcroft and Your Child
by Jennifer Van Bergen
t r u t h o u t | Commentary
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/09.23Bb.jvb.child.htm
Sunday, 22 September, 2002

A reader from New Hampshire wrote me recently: "I have just received a letter from my son's high school telling me that the "No Child Left Behind Act" has a section 9258 that is titled "Armed Forces Recruiter Access To Students" and that unless parents tell the school not to, they will by this Act, provide to requesting military recruiters all the names and addresses and phones of junior and senior students."

The reader wrote that she intends "to rage rage rage against the use of our beautiful children as fodder for the oil lusting warmongers."

Rightly so.

The statute requires every "local educational agency" that receives assistance under the Act (which they all do) to provide student records, upon request, to the military.

all Bush has to do is stop oil dependency and it would solve a lot of problems even behond the environment, but of course he's too greedy for that.

What about that funding towards hydrogen powered cars he promised during his campaign?

What a lying sack. :grr: