White House Drops Effort To Relax Pollution Limits

The Bush administration has announced it is abandoning its pursuit of two
proposed regulations that would relax air-pollution standards for power
plants.  This ends the pursuit of one of
the last remaining goals of Vice President Dick Cheney’s
Energy Task Force, set up in 2001.

The Environmental Protection
Agency sent out a brief statement to reporters announcing that it would not
pursue the changes in how power-plant emissions are measured, The
New York Times reports. The changes would have allowed increases in hundreds
of thousands of tons of pollutants, more specifically smog-inducing sulfur
dioxide and nitrogen oxides.

“We didn’t want to be faced with putting a midnight regulation in place,”
EPA Press
Secretary Jonathan Shradar said
on the decision to drop the pollution-standard revision. “It was better to
leave those incomplete rather than force something through.”