The EPA today proposed tougher standards for soot pollution today, in a move required by the courts, which they say 99% of all communities can meet without further action. The Environmental Protection Agency announced the proposed change on Friday; it would decrease the allowable fine particle pollution, or soot, to a range of between 12 [...]

While I was watching a generally weak set of questioning of Jamie Dimon at the Senate Banking Committee (outside of Menendez, Brown and especially Merkley), Zach Carter was reporting on a key leaked document from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. This is the “NAFTA for Asia” trade deal that Senators sought more transparency for earlier in [...]

So I’m going to be stepping away from the blog for a couple weeks as I take a long-delayed vacation. But as I’ve said, I won’t be leaving you empty-handed. I have assembled a diverse group of writers to hold down the fort over the next two weeks. Kathleen Geier: You may remember her from [...]

The EPA will announce the first federal rules against fracking. Curiously, however, the rules have nothing to do with the Clean Water Act, but seek to reduce the air pollution around fracking sites. This is also a problem, but most of the attention around the corrosive side effects of fracking has revolved around water contamination. [...]

Kaid Benfield from the Natural Resources Defense Council takes a look on the bright side in regards to the foreclosure crisis, postulating that it will sound the death knell for exurban communities and sprawl: The subject of the Great Recession came up, and I volunteered that I thought the persistent economic slump had hurt both [...]

The new EPA rules on future power plants will limit but not reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the near future, and maybe ever, if natural gas prices remain low. No new coal-fired plants are really on the horizon post-2012, and while without carbon capture and sequestration equipment they couldn’t be built, nobody’s clamoring to build [...]

After years of study, the EPA will finally release their initial greenhouse gas emissions rules for power plants, which are likely to end the construction of any coal-fired plants from this point forward. The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any [...]

Joe Nocera has a bizarre column today, a riposte to anti-fracking activists, really, that can be summed up in three words: “Get over it.” Fracking isn’t going away. To put it another way, the technique of hydraulic fracturing, used to extract natural gas from once-impossible-to-get-at reservoirs like the Marcellus Shale that lies beneath New York [...]

TransCanada, the company trying to build the Keystone XL pipeline, has split off a domestic pipeline from the one that crosses a national border, moving to begin work on a pipeline from Cushing, Oklahoma to Port Arthur, Texas. The segment from Canada down to Cushing, however, will need a separate permit application and could take [...]

The Republican theory on the Keystone XL pipeline is that the President is holding back the immediate creation of eleventy billion jobs by refusing to give approval to a permit for construction. Under their various pieces of legislation, TransCanada, the pipeline operator, would be able to immediately begin construction and create jobs hauling tar sands [...]

After weeks of apprehension, the Environmental Protection Agency will step in to supply drinking water to residents of Dimock, PA, a de facto acknowledgment that fracking led to contamination of the water supply in this town along the Delaware River Basin. On Friday, the agency announced it would bring tanks of drinking water to four [...]