I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
New Mexico has become the 13th state to side with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s new rules regulating greenhouse gas emissions from oil refineries, cement facilities and coal power plants, Attorney General Gary King announced Thursday.
“The coalition today filed a motion in the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene to defend the Environmental Protection Agency and oppose the lawsuits brought by industry groups that are suing the EPA to overturn the regulation,” King said. “As New Mexico’s chief legal officer, I have an obligation to protect our families’ health and well being from major pollution emissions.”
The EPA’s new rules will add control of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases, which scientists believe to be contributing to climate change, to the agency’s responsibilities under the Clean Air Act.
The regulations will take affect January 2011.
Oil refineries, cement kilns and power plants produce 70 percent of non-vehicle greenhouse gases, according to the AG’s office.
But the industry-funded Coalition for Responsible Regulation has sued the EPA over the new regulations, saying it unfairly and “haphazardly” targets only larger emitters of these gases.
“The (industry) coalition expects to expose the fundamental flaws in EPA’s misuse of the Clean Air Act — a statute designed to deal with dirty air — to instead haphazardly redirect U.S. energy and industrial and agricultural policy under the pretext of controlling a trace, benign, naturally variable constituent of clean air present in equal concentrations around the world,” said coalition attorney Eric Groten.
New Mexico joins 12 other states in the coalition supporting the EPA’s new regulations: California, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
