Senate Tramples Four Dirty Air Acts

The Senate just voted to reject four—count ’em 1-2-3-4—bad amendments that would strangle and block the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from being able to limit dangerous carbon dioxide pollution from the nation’s biggest polluters. These Dirty Air Acts went down in the upper chamber today because enough of the Senate still obviously believes that the well-being,…

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Why I Fight for Our Forests: Earthjustice's Tom Waldo

Protecting our national forests is essential for the future of our nation. Tom Waldo, who joined Earthjustice in 1989 and is a staff attorney in the Juneau, Alaska office, discusses his work protecting our forests.

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Tr-Ash Talk: Mapping Environmental Injustice

From South Carolina to Alabama and all across the country, coal ash—which can leach dangerous toxic chemicals like arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury, and selenium into groundwater—is often stockpiled in low-income communities. Coal ash presents risks of both catastrophic spills, like the 2008 TVA coal ash disaster, and more common dangers, like pollution of groundwater used…

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Arsenic-Flavored Baby Food?

House GOP members have been attacking clean air standards by pumping the stalled budget bill up with “riders” that remove the agency’s ability to clean up mercury, dioxins, arsenic and a host of other toxic chemicals from power plants, cement kilns, incinerators and the like. But last week, a group called American Family Voices ran…

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Not "Having Fun" In Bokoshe, OK

Last week, coal ash coverage went national with a fine segment on ABC World News that told the story of residents in Bokoshe, OK, a small town with a very big coal ash problem. Only 450 folks live in Bokoshe, but as reporter Jim Sciutto discovered, many of them either have cancer or know someone…

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Friday Finds: Toilet Talk

California flushes carbon emissions down the toilet The California Energy Commission has its head in the toilet, but surprisingly, that’s a good thing. Human waste is a huge pollution problem in the U.S. In fact, Californians alone produced 661,000 dry metric tons of biosolids in 2009. But instead of getting rid of the waste by…

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Kansas Keeps Getting In The Way of Big Coal

After four years of trying, Big Coal’s national ambitions have again bogged down at the Kansas state line.  A federal judge this week agreed with Earthjustice that the federal government failed to consider  environmental impacts of the proposed Sunflower plant expansion. The government has a financial stake in the plant because of loan arrangements made…

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Obama Says the Cure for Oil Addiction Is More Oil

As oil and gas prices again climb in response to Middle East travails, the phrase “Drill, Baby, Drill” has re-entered the national conversation—but it’s President Obama who did the uttering this time. And it sounds like he means it. Obama mentioned the mantra Tuesday night in a speech about energy independence that came across like the opening…

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