This blog article got picked up today on MSNBC on how Vice President Cheney took on a decisive role to undercut long-standing environmental regulations for the benefit of business. You can read the details, but I wanted to highlight something that surprised me most. The article says that former EPA Administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, resigned due to Cheney and his pro-business stance. Specifically she resigned due to a provision of the Clean Air Act known as the New Source Review, which requires older plants that belch millions of tons of smog and soot each year to install modern pollution controls when they are refurbished in a way that increases emissions. Industry officials complained that even when they had merely performed routine maintenance and repairs, the Clinton administration hit them with violations and multimillion-dollar lawsuits. Cheney's energy task force re-wrote the rule, allowing some of the nation's dirtiest plants to make major modifications without installing costly new pollution controls. "I just couldn't sign it," she said. "The president has a right to have an administrator who could defend it, and I just couldn't." A federal appeals court has since found that the rule change violated the Clean Air Act. In their ruling, the judges said that the administration had redefined the law in a way that could be valid "only in a Humpty-Dumpty world." by
Erin Swanson
Eswanson@enviance.com | 
