Obama’s Path to Progress: Will the White House Compel Rich Utilities to Clean Up Giant Coal Ash Pits?

We'll soon learn the results of White House deliberations over EPA's long-delayed coal ash rule, one of the Essential 13 regulatory initiatives we've called upon President Barack Obama to complete before he leaves office. Under the terms of a consent decree, EPA is required to issue its new rule by Friday, December 19. As glad as we are to see this phase of the rule's tortuous odyssey come to a close, we suspect that court, not a victory party, will be the public interest community's next stop, despite a late-entry expose aired by 60 Minutes last week. In the universe of self-inflicted environmental wounds over the last two decades, any "10 best" list must include the brilliant decision to make operators of coal-fired power plants scrub smokestacks to keep mercury, arsenic, cadmium, and lead particles out of the air but neglecting to prevent them from picking the bad stuff up off the grate, carting it a short distance, and dumping it into giant pits in the ground. Utilities generate an astounding 100 million tons of such inky sludge annually. But because the federal government has never issued minimum requirements for such dumps, and state laws are rarely adequate, these pits have been left to grow wider, deeper, and taller, contaminating drinking water and threatening catastrophic spills.