It’s been a little over a year since an environmental catastrophe 100 times larger than the Exxon-Valdez spill hit a Tennessee town of just over 5,000 people, and the regulations promised to prevent it from occurring again are still being debated. Coal ash – a carcinogenic mixture of heavy metals like arsenic, lead and selenium – spilled over 300 acres, burying fifteen homes and contaminating a river in Kingston, Tenn. Coal or fly ash, which is the waste leftover from burning coal, isn’t defined as a hazardous material and its disposal isn’t regulated by the EPA. During EPA director Lisa Jackson’s senate confirmation hearing last year, she told Senator Barbra Boxer that she’d consider regulating coal ash.

After years of neglect, suppressed reports, silenced scientists, and lack of resources, the Environmental Protection Agency is back to doing it's job. 

Two years ago the Supreme Court ruled that CO2 was a pollutant and gave the EPA a mandate to establish a system to abate carbon emissions through the Clean Air Act. The Bush administration's EPA dragged its feet and it took an overwhelming progressive electoral victory for the agency to finally comply with the ruling.

Administrator Lisa Jackson announced last week that the Obama Administration will start cracking down on the largest CO2 emitters in the nation and demand that new coal power plants use the best available technology to reduce emissions.

 "This rule allows us to do what the Clean Air Act does best – reduce emissions for better health, drive technology innovation for a better economy, and protect the environment for a better future – all without placing an undue burden on the businesses that make up the better part of our economy.” Said Administrator Jackson at the Governors' Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles.

 This is a tremendous victory and we commend the EPA, Administrator Jackson, and President Obama for taking this important step towards protecting public health and reducing global carbon pollution. 

Last week, Campus Progress and the Center for American Progress hosted another installation of the series “Conversations with Daschle,” featuring a dialogue between former Senator Tom Daschle, and former Governor of New Jersey and EPA administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, held at the Georgetown University GPPI Student Lounge.

In addition to free pizza and drinks, guests were treated to a serious and comprehensive discussion on environmental policy. Although Whitman and Daschle are from opposite sides of the aisle, both agreed that climate change should no longer be treated as a politicized idea with disputed science, but as an objective reality.

While Senator Daschle was optimistic about the potential legislative efforts in Congress to ease human impact on climate change, Ms. Whitman was similarly pleased but admitted that she was cautious about some of the more “bold” proposals that have recently been made. Ms. Whitman maintained a strong support for a cap-and-trade system as a realistic solution, citing its success with respect to non-greenhouse gases and reiterating the need for businesses to have positive incentives in order to enact real progress. Approaches based solely on broad regulation, such as caps on carbon output, go too far and are not likely to be adopted, Ms. Whitman offered.

Both agreed that the legislative freedom provided in state governments have allowed states to serve as apt laboratories for the possible directions for environmental policy, with Governor Schwarzenegger’s California being the most obvious example. Both also fielded questions from the audience, covering topics ranging from what college students can do to make their campus green, to how to make being environmentally conscious "sexy." 

This was the seventh in the series of “Conversations with Daschle,” which features the former Senate Majority Leader casually discussing a certain subject with a different prominent politician or D.C. personality.