EPA Rejects Palm Oil: Good News for Indonesian Rainforests

Before I started doing environmental work, I’d assumed that biofuel use would have a positive effect on the climate. It turns out the truth about biofuels is much more complex than I’d originally thought. Not every biofuel on the market today has a positive impact on the environment, and some actually pose a major threat. [...]

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EPA Announces Powerful Air Pollution Safeguards: You Spoke and Lisa Jackson Listened

As the holidays draw near I’m raising a glass to all of you RAN activists, because—along with hundreds of thousands of clean air advocate allies—you stood up and asked the Environmental Protection Agency to protect our environment and our bodies from toxic pollutants. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced the first-ever Mercury and Air Toxics Standards [...]

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Why Would Anyone Want To Work For Chevron?

Ahead of President Obama’s big jobs speech tonight, Chevron CEO John Watson says that Obama shouldn’t call for ending the $4 billion in taxpayer handouts Big Oil receives in order to use that money to create jobs. Instead, Watson suggested, Obama should end EPA regulations aimed at keeping his industry from destroying the planet. Presumably [...]

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Obama Buries Bad News, Insults Us All

If you blinked, you probably missed it. Last Friday, when most were getting ready to enjoy the Labor Day holiday, President Obama slipped out an announcement that he was asking the Environmental Protection Agency to abandon a move to strengthen air pollution rules, a tightening of the Ozone Standard. I had hoped for better than [...]

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New Poll Shows Overwhelming Support for Clean Water Act – In Mountaintop Removal States

A new poll released yesterday of likely voters in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia shows widespread opposition to mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining and overwhelming support for enforcement of the Clean Water Act to better protect rivers and streams from the impacts of MTR. In a statement that accompanies the release, the pollsters said: [...]

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Top 5 Reasons The Obama-GOP Debt Ceiling Agreement Is A Bad Deal For The Environment

President Obama just signed the debt deal into law. Just in time too — there were about 10 hours to spare before the midnight deadline, after which our government would most likely go into default. As bad as default would have been, the deal doesn’t appear to be a whole lot better. As Andy Kroll [...]

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Who’s Bankrolling AEP, the Coal Company Lobbying for More Coal?

American Electric Power Company, more commonly known as AEP, has been in the news lately. The banks providing funds to this dirty energy purveyor haven’t received as much scrutiny, however. Let’s fix that, shall we? Earlier this month, AEP announced that upcoming EPA clean air regulations (which have now been announced) may mean that the [...]

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EPA’s New Rule: Yet Another Reason to Quit Coal

This morning the EPA gave us some news we’ve been waiting a long time for. Administrator Lisa Jackson announced The Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, a critical regulation that mandates strict limits on soot and smog emissions from coal-fired power plants. In the words of the EPA, this rule “will protect communities that are home to [...]

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Do EPA Staff Get Threatened With Tuna Heads In Their Beds?

Last night’s edition of John Stewart’s The Daily Show featured EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson explaining why we need to clean up coal-fired power plants. Her reason is pretty compelling (you can watch below): “Mercury’s a neuro-toxin, it destroys our children’s brains, oftentimes before they’re born. These standards are estimated to prevent 17,000 premature deaths and [...]

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New Mountaintop Removal Report Card: Which Banks Made the Grade

It’s way past time for the world’s banks to stop funding the wholesale destruction of Appalachia’s ecosystems. Rainforest Action Network and the Sierra Club released the 2011 Mountaintop Removal Report Card today. The report card exposes relationships between 10 of the biggest banks in the world and the top companies practicing mountaintop removal mining in [...]

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