Three environmental items worth noting before they get too far out of the news

- Shrub's fatuously-named "Clear Skies" plan to dismantle air quality regulations under cover of improving them

would not reduce pollution as much as existing Clean Air Act regulations, according to an interim report by the National Academy of Sciences [released January 14]. ...

The National Academies report, written by an independent panel of university professors and researchers, stated that Clear Skies, currently under consideration by Congress, is less stringent than a set of regulations known as New Source Review,

which requires utilities to install upgraded pollution controls along with plant upgrades. The program, created in 1977 to stop the practice of utilities' evading air quality laws by expanding existing plants grandfathered into the Clean Air Act rather than building new ones,

triggered dozens of state and federal suits against more than 50 power plants during the 1990s and forced some to install new pollution control,

said the Washington Post.

Shrub's Blear Skies plan would create an emissions credit-trading regime - thus allowing rich, polluting plants to continue polluting, even to increase their pollution, so long as it's cheaper to buy credits than to clean up their act. And I'm never quite sure how this is supposed to reduce pollution; seems to me all it really does is serve to concentrate it in fewer areas. The supposed "success" of a similar program related to acid rain-related emissions doesn't impress me not only because the technology is different but because so far as I'm aware, there's nothing to indicate the reductions achieved are in any way beyond those that would have been expected anyway.

In any event, this is what I noticed, from the San Francisco Chronicle's version of the story:

"The new source program is not an emissions-control program - it's an enforcement program," said Scott Segal, spokesman for the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a utility group. "And in order for enforcement to produce reductions in emissions, you have to win the case, and the process can be a long and arduous one."

Cynthia Bergman, spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency, agreed.

"Case-by-case litigation ... is a blunt tool that will never achieve the across-the-board reductions that the acid rain program has done and that we anticipate" from President Bush's proposals, she said.

Now, besides the fact that the argument is based on the nonsensical premise that utilities will now fight tooth and nail against living up to their obligations under current law but would never violate their responsibilities under a cap-trading program, does it make anyone other than me itchy to hear the corporate lobbying group and the EPA make the exact same argument?

Footnote: A spokesman for Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-OK) said "Clear Skies is more protective of human health because we know we're going to get early and guaranteed reductions from it."

Inhofe is the 40-watt bulb who called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people and the world."

- Speaking of global warming, the chief scientific adviser to the government of Great Britain said he is being targeted by American lobbyists trying to discredit his views about its dangers.

Sir David King said he was being followed around the world by people in the pay of vested-interest groups that want to cast doubt on the science of climate change.

Last year, Sir David said the threat from global warming was greater than that posed by international terrorism and he has criticised the Bush administration for pulling out of the Kyoto treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Since then, he has given many lectures to international audiences but found individuals among them who are there solely to create the impression that he is presenting biased information. ...

"You have a group of lobbyists, some of whom are chasing me around the planet, which I'm chuffed about because it means they are worrying about what I'm saying, and these lobbyists stand up after I've given an hour's talk and say, 'There are scientists who disagree with you'," Sir David said.

"I always say, 'Which bit of the science that I've just presented to you are you challenging'? I don't get the answer."

Last November, Myron Ebell, from a right-wing Washington think-tank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said on BBC Radio 4 that Sir David is an "alarmist with ridiculous views who knows nothing about climate change".

So the chief scientist of the UK knows nothing about climate change but Myron Ebell, so scientifically illiterate he doesn't even understand the concept of models, is. Right.

By the way, the remark lead to a motion in the House of Commons to censure Ebell for his "unfounded and insulting" assertion.

(Note: Globalwarming.org, source of the above link, is actually a right-wing outfit trying to undermine public knowledge of global warming under a veneer of claimed impartiality.)

- Corporate-funded nay-sayers like Ebell continue to pocket their blood money even as the crud their employers produce continues to kill.

Women who breathe air polluted with smoke and exhaust fumes[, reports The Independent (UK) on January 17.] are up to four times more likely to have children who develop cancer, a study shows. Research at the University of Birmingham suggests atmospheric pollution from oil-fired furnaces and vehicle exhausts may be the principal cause of childhood cancer.

By linking pollution "hot spots" round the country with the incidence of cancer, the findings show that pregnant women and those about to conceive who live near factories, power stations or major road junctions are at greatest risk.

The study was published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Emeritus professor of epidemiology George Knox, who did the study, said the evidence indicated that exposure to pollution accounts for at least half of all childhood cancers.

And under Drear Skies we face the prospect of still more.