mercury

How Garden-Variety Air Pollution Regulation Promotes Environmental Justice

Cleaning up our nation’s air benefits the disadvantaged most of all.

Evidence is mounting that air pollution regulation is an effective way of reducing  health disparities between disadvantaged communities and the population as a whole. The basic reason is simple: Air pollution is the biggest environmental threat to poor communities and communities of color.  As the American Lung Association has said: “The burden of air pollution …

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Our Air is a Lot Cleaner and Prospects for Climate Action a Lot Brighter Thanks to Citizen Suits

Climate change, ozone and mercury rules all the result of citizen suits

Three sets of Obama Administration’s environmental rules are in the news these days:  those on climate change, mercury and ozone.  The President is being praised among environmentalists for his ambitious actions and lambasted by some business and Republican leaders for engaging in a “war on coal.”   Yet lost among the clamor is one key …

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A new treaty on global mercury: not much, but better than nothing

Next week in Japan, an international diplomatic meeting will sign and adopt a new environmental treaty, the Minamata Convention on Mercury Pollution, which was finalized in negotiations earlier this year. In its name – and in locating the conference in Minamata and the nearby city of Kumamoto, in Kyushu– the convention commemorates the victims of …

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Supreme Court Grants Review in Criminal Environmental Enforcement Case

The U.S. Supreme Court is obviously interested in environmental enforcement, or at least the legal issues arising out of environmental enforcement cases. Today, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in a second environmental enforcement case it will hear and decide in its current Term. Southern Union Co v. United States, No. 11-94. This follows the justices’ …

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