Air

"AUSTIN -- Exxon Mobil Corp. has reported inadvertent emissions of large amounts of pollutants at its flagship refinery near Houston."

"MIAMI -- The chief executive of the century-old company from America's heartland shifted nervously on the witness stand here as he tried to explain how a trusted senior vice president had been caught on a wiretap buying half a million dollars in smuggled merchandise, much of it from China."

"Canada's government finalized much-anticipated regulations on Wednesday for phasing out the country's old coal-fired power plants in a move critics condemned as a watering down of earlier proposals to cut carbon emissions."

"The fallout has begun just one day after a federal appeals court scrapped a major EPA rule designed to curb long-distance drifting power plant pollution -- and Louisville's air quality may pay the price."

"WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Tuesday overturned a federal rule that laid out how much air pollution states would have to clean up to avoid incurring violations in downwind states.

 The decision sends the Environmental Protection Agency, and perhaps even Congress, back to the drawing board in what has become a long and paralyzing argument over how to mesh a system of state-by-state regulation with the problem of industrial smokestacks pumping pollutants into a single atmosphere.

"RANJIT NAGAR, India -- When the United Nations wanted to help slow climate change, it established what seemed a sensible system. Greenhouse gases were rated based on their power to warm the atmosphere. The more dangerous the gas, the more that manufacturers in developing nations would be compensated as they reduced their emissions. But where the United Nations envisioned environmental reform, some manufacturers of gases used in air-conditioning and refrigeration saw a lucrative business opportunity."

"In the Olympics of pollution, an environmental group has given Kentucky a gold medal of sorts for spewing the most toxic air emissions from its power plants, most of them fueled by coal."

"FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. -- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has issued its final rule aimed at cleaning up the largest single source of haze-causing pollutants in the country."