The Washington Post Consistently Misrepresents President Bush On Clean Air

Just as CBS and Dan Rather tipped their partisan hand during the last presidential election, The Washingon Post clearly has a biased agenda to paint President Bush as 'weakening clean air laws and regulations' when this president has proposed and passed some of the most visionary clean air initiatives in history. President Bush's Clear Skies Initiative would have cleaned the air more than the last quarter century of litigation to try to stuff 'command and control' compliance down the stacks of the utilities. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 will hopefully reinvigorate the nuclear industry, which will be a pure technological clean air mechanism. Nuclear power plants are an emission free source of electricity production.

We wish The Washington Post would report the news instead of fashioning news according to its own view, which appears to be overly influenced by partisan, mainstream environmental groups. The most recent example of this is a quote from an article today entitled, Justices to Hear Environmental Appeal on EPA Emissions Rule: "Lightening the industry's environmental load was a key component of the administration policy adopted by Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001." The decades-in-and-decades-out litigation dance of the mainstream environmental groups against EPA and EPA against the utilites does not lead to technological retrofits. It simply leads to more litigation, which does nothing to clean the air. The appeal by Environmental Defense will be heard by the Supreme Court and they might prevail in their insistence on implementing the ineffective New Source Review air regulation, but it will not lead to clean air. And this is ashamed since the Clear Skies Initiative was based on emissions trading concepts developed by Environmental Defense.