EPA Hits The Road To Seek Input On New Rules

Today's post was shared by Huffington Post and comes from www.huffingtonpost.com

The U.S. states that already have a plan in place to cut carbon pollution from power plants are likely to make the case to regulators this week that their program offers a viable model for others to follow. The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday kicks off an 11-city "listening tour" as part of its effort to craft emissions rules for existing power plants. The tour starts in New York and Atlanta. Meetings will then be held from Boston to Seattle, wrapping up on Nov. 8. The agency is expected to solicit ideas on how best to regulate carbon emissions from the more than 1,000 power plants now in operation - the cornerstone and arguably the most controversial part of the Obama administration's strategy to address climate change. The EPA will use a rarely employed section of the federal Clean Air Act, known as section 111(d), and will rely heavily on input from states to craft a flexible rule that can be applied to states with different energy profiles. President Barack Obama set a June 2014 deadline for the agency to propose its rules, which need to be finalized in June 2015. Officials from some of the nine northeastern states in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) - a carbon trading program targeting power sector emissions - will attend some of the sessions and make the case that the initiative has a "plug and play" option for states to meet future federal...

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What Happens When The Government Shuts Down 94 Percent of the EPA

Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

Tuesday morning, 94 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency's 16,000 workers were furloughed due to the government shutdown. "They basically lock things up, batten things down, which takes a few hours, then a vast majority of people are sent home," says consultant Dina Kruger, who worked at the EPA during the 1996 government shutdown. To make sense of what it means that over 15,000 EPA employees are now sitting at home instead of working, consider how many facets of the environment the agency has its hands in: The EPA monitors air quality, regulates pesticides and waste, cleans up hazardous chemical spills, and ensures that people have safe drinking water, among other things. Now, according to the plan it laid out for the shutdown, only some workers will be on hand to respond to emergencies and to monitor labs and property. That means the EPA will temporarily halt cleanup at 507 superfund sites across the country, the agency told the Huffington Post. Sites where the EPA was cleaning up hazardous chemicals are shuttered in any situation where closing them down won't be an immediate threat to the surroundings. This will slow down cleanups and tack on additional costs that will accrue as these contaminated sites are left to their own devices, says Scott Slesinger, legislative director at the National Resources Defense Council and a former EPA employee. "The only sites that would be exempted would be those that, if they stopped working...

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