CHARLESTON, WV — “There’s plenty of evidence that EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson has never been all that hot to do anything about coal ash in the first place.
The TVA coal-ash disaster in Tennessee occurred in December 2008, a couple of weeks after the election. Only a few months into the Obama administration, in March 2009, EPA promised it would propose a rule by the end of that year. But come December 2009, as the first anniversary of the TVA disaster approached, Lisa Jackson was backing off that timeline.
… EPA didn’t announce a proposed rule until May 2010, and even then, it wasn’t so much a proposal as an outline of what we already knew: There were two major options for how the agency could go about regulating coal ash, and EPA couldn’t decide which one it wanted to use. And then, in May 2011, EPA announced it wasn’t going to complete a final rule in 2011 … So after talking pretty big about coal ash concerns, the Obama EPA has now spent four years thinking about it, and has no final rule to show for it.”
— Ken Ward, Jr., Charleston Gazette
