Word: epa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pollute, you get posted. But this is what the Environmental Protection Agency has told manufacturers, as part of a drive to give the public access to corporations' environmental records via the Internet. Data for hundreds of the worst polluters in the country will be posted on the EPA's website, and the Agency hopes this will encourage industry to regulate itself...
...EPA is required by law to make regulatory decisions without regard to the cost of implementing them, and Browner, in her typical up-front fashion, acknowledged from the start that the cost of the new standards will be high--up to $8.5 billion a year, according to agency estimates. Yet the cleanup will, by her calculations, also save 15,000 lives, cut hospital admissions for respiratory illness by 9,000 and reduce chronic bronchitis cases by 60,000 each year. Surely that is worth a few billion...
Maybe so, but friends and foes alike were quick to point out that her figures are anything but solid. The original trigger for Browner's proposal was a lawsuit brought by the American Lung Association. The suit accused the EPA of ignoring new scientific evidence showing that small particles in the air--bits of matter much tinier than the diameter of a human hair--are especially harmful to health. A federal judge ordered the agency to look at the evidence and, if the data warranted it, come up with new regulations...
...EPA reviewed 86 separate studies about the association between soot and dust particles and human illness. The agency was already thinking about tightening its rules on ozone, a noxious form of oxygen produced in the burning of fossil fuels. (Another fossil-fuel combustion by-product, carbon dioxide, is a greenhouse gas, responsible in large part for the phenomenon of global warming.) It reviewed an additional 186 studies on ozone, making this, according to Browner, the most extensive scientific review undertaken for any air standard the EPA has proposed...
...President's decision to support Browner is a major victory for the EPA chief, but the new regulations still face a challenge by Congress. Many Republicans and some Democrats have vowed to pass a law overturning them. Support for the EPA crosses party lines: Republican Senator Alfonse D'Amato of New York announced last week that he'd fight any attempt to weaken the rules. And even if Congress passes legislation to overturn the rules, opponents would probably be unable to muster enough votes to override a presidential veto...