NYT: ("Clear Skies") Air Pollution Initiative Is Revived

[DeepModem Mom]

President's Air Pollution Initiative Is Revived
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
Published: May 27, 2005


WASHINGTON, May 26 - President Bush's moribund air pollution initiative got unexpected life on Thursday when the Environmental Protection Agency agreed to analyze competing legislation, satisfying a months-old request from the Senate.

Efforts by a Senate committee to advance the White House measure, known as Clear Skies, failed on a 9-to-9 vote in March after Senator Thomas R. Carper, a Delaware Democrat who voted against it, complained that the agency had been unwilling to examine his bill and several others, all of which set tighter emission standards than those in the administration measure.

Eight Democrats and one Republican, Senator Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island, voted against the White House plan while nine Republicans voted for it.

But in a House subcommittee hearing on Clear Skies on Thursday, James L. Connaughton, the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said the agency had agreed to analyze all the competing bills.

While satisfying the request was no assurance that Mr. Carper would support Mr. Bush's initiative, it could persuade another Democrat, perhaps Senator Max Baucus of Montana, who has been under pressure from interest groups in his state to support the administration bill, to change his vote....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/politics/27enviro.html