Our World and Everything in It

An appeal was filed last year in the Supreme Court when a U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia threw out the EPA’s cap and trade program for mercury, and the court told the EPA how they “erred by taking power plants off the list of hazardous pollution sources when it issued its Clean Air Mercury Rule” that advocated the cap and trade program. The court then gave the EPA two years to develop mercury emissions standards for existing power plants. http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/2008/02/us-court-of-appeals-gets-tough-on-epa-and-mercury-pollution/

Well, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider the appeal Monday. The court’s decision not to hear the case this time around “invalidates the U.S. EPA’s so-called Clean Air Mercury Rule, which would have allowed dangerous levels of mercury pollution to persist under a weak cap-and-trade program that would not have taken full effect until after 2020,” according to an article on ENS website.

The article went on to say, “The Supreme Court also granted the Obama administration’s request, made two weeks ago, to drop the Bush administration appeal.” So the idea of cap and trade for mercury is pretty much a dead dog. To top it all off, Lisa Jackson as the newly appointed EPA Administrator promises to move quickly to develop stricter mercury standards for power plants—uh, oh.

Let’s see how clean coal can get, LOL.

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2009/2009-02-24-093.asp

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Bush Administration, Coal, Coalburners, EPA, Environmental Legislation, Environmentalism, Fossil Fuel, Global Warming, Industry, Mercury, Utilities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.