EPA chief encourages college activists in campaign against coal Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/27/128523/epa-chief-encourages-college-activists.html#ixzz1c1tIcQ00

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/27/128523/epa-chief-encourages-college-activists.html

Posted on Thursday, October 27, 2011
By Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — College environmental activists met Thursday with Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson to tell her what they're doing at their schools to try to shut down campus coal-fired heating plants.

"It's so important that your voices are heard, that campuses that are supposed to be teaching people aren't meanwhile polluting the surrounding community with mercury and costing the children a few IQ points because of the need to generate power. It's simply not fair," Jackson said.

The three dozen student activists from coal-consuming states such as Georgia, Kentucky and Indiana included leaders of Sierra Club campus groups that have been pushing to switch from coal to cleaner forms of energy.

"Make sure we don't lose what we have already in trying to keep stretching forward," Jackson told them. "Because it would be tragic if we take one step forward and then we end up taking five or six steps back."

Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, have held 168 roll-call votes so far this year on measures that would reduce the EPA's authority under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, waste-disposal laws and other national laws.

"None of them are safe right now," Jackson said of those environmental-protection statutes. "It was my generation and a generation before who advocated in the '60s until 1970, and finally they created the EPA in 1970. You would think all that's behind us? We're talking about losing all that."

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