If the President has his way, the EPA will be loosening up on polluters and potential polluters, making comliance with the Clean Air Act more "voluntary", which is another way of saying optional.
When the President was Governor of Texas, he tried the same thing environmental regualtions there, including allowing polluters to even avoid bad press by allowing them to report a problem, and promise to fix it, and gagging inspectors. As I've noted earlier, this approach just didn't work.
Happily, there is some good news for those who still favor fossil fuels: Australia has come up with a way to cleanly burn th methane and low quality coal left over from coal mines. It must be ubnderstood that in this case "clean" is a relative term. The process claims to burn these by-products as cleanly as natural gas, which is better than fuel-oil or regular coal, but still not as good as solar or wond power.
Still, every little bit helps. Of course, with the ush Administration's plan, there's no incentive for American power producers to use cleaner technology, but at least he rest of world will be trying.
Posted by Chris at January 2, 2003 01:36 PM