In an article in the latest edition of The Environmental Forum, Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus slammed the ruling by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson overturning the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s veto of the Spruce No. 1 mine permit. Lazarus teaches environmental law, natural resources Law, Supreme Court advocacy and torts at Harvard. via [...]

The public comment period on the two options for regulating the waste closed on November 19, and the EPA says it logged more than 400,000 comments on the rule. The agency has not offered a timeline for announcement of the final rule. Most observers aren’t expecting it until the end of 2011 at the earliest—cold [...]

A state order against TVA will idle the Kingston Fossil Plant’s new $456 million air scrubber until the utility drains and relines the 1-year-old gypsum waste pond that sprang a leak last week. The leak, discovered Wednesday — exactly one week before the 2-year anniversary of TVA’s 1.2 million-gallon coal ash spill at the same [...]

In a new episode of Big Coal Gone Wild last week, coal lobbyists announced their intentions to rebrand mountaintop removal mining as “mountaintop development.” For besieged residents living near mountaintop removal sites in Appalachia–and in the 20-odd states that allow strip-mining–this announcement has triggered another name suggestion: Given that millions of pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel [...]