The New EPA: Protecting Polluters, James Pew, TomPaine.com
To citizens anxious about increasing levels of pollution, the Environmental Protection Agency was created to provide a little peace of mind. But, as James Pew reports in TomPaine.com, the agency is not catching all violators of the Clean Air Act, and is itself breaking the law by not following its own guidelines. 'The EPA is doing a terrible job in controlling emissions. It has missed every single deadline in recent memory for controlling toxic air pollution. As a result, almost half of the industries that emit major amounts of toxic air pollution are still not regulated,' Pew writes. The author also contests EPA head Christine Todd Whitman's misleading of the public with her insistence that the EPA is meeting deadlines, as well as the questionable ties of the EPA's air program director, Jeffrey Holmstead, who until taking his post had been a lawyer for companies that Pew lists as 'pro-pollution lobby groups.'
--Julie Madsen
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