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E.P.A. Chief Stands Firm as Tough Rules LoomWASHINGTON — In the next weeks and months, Lisa P. Jackson, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, is scheduled to establish regulations on smog, mercury, carbon dioxide, mining waste and vehicle emissions that will affect every corner of the economy.She is working under intense pressure from opponents in Congress, from powerful industries, from impatient environmentalists and from the Supreme Court, which just affirmed the agency’s duty to address global warming emissions, a project that carries profound economic implications.The new rules will roll out just as President Obama’s re-election campaign is getting under way, with a White House highly sensitive to the probability of political damage from a flood of government mandates that will strike particularly hard at the manufacturing sector in states crucial to the 2012 election.(snip)Mr. Reilly said the White House had left Ms. Jackson out on a limb when it failed to push hard for the cap-and-trade climate change bill that passed the House in 2009 but stalled in the Senate last year. Administration officials had argued that legislation was far superior to agency regulation as a means of addressing climate-altering emissions. But when the bill ran up against bipartisan opposition in the Senate, Mr. Reilly said, “the White House didn’t lift a finger,†an assertion administration officials dispute.
EPA Funds Green Groups That Sue The Agency To ExpandWhen the Environmental Protection Agency said in late June that it would force Western coal-fired power plants to install haze-reducing pollution-control equipment at a cost of $1.5 billion a year, it said it had to in order to settle a lawsuit by environmental groups.One organization involved in the suit, the Environmental Defense Fund, has a long history of taking the EPA to court. In fact, a cursory review finds almost half a dozen cases in the past 10 years.The odd thing is that the EPA, in turn, has handed EDF $2.76 million in grants over that same period, according to an IBD review of the agency's grant database.
