EPA

A poison pill buried within the new debt ceiling deal would "gut" key elements of the nation's bedrock environmental law in exchange for preventing a national default and could make it easier for highway-building agencies to expedite road projects that harm vulnerable communities for generations, advocates warn.

Emissions will lessen in five neighboring counties — with health benefits all around.

Combustion vehicles invite law-breaking. Petro-masculinity is deep-seated in American culture. But California, at least, has vanquished emissions tampering. These are the takeaways from last week's report of super-spreader pickup trucks.

Let’s say you worked for a city that was trying to revitalize a piece of land with a bunch of dilapidated buildings on it. You want to build some residences and some retail space, and you want to make better connections to the street grid. Congratulations – HUD and U.S. DOT both have money to help you get where you’re going. Except, oops: HUD is going to demand that you hire locally, to create jobs in the community, while U.S. DOT is going to demand that you get a competitive bid, showing no preference for local hires. Everyone you talk to at either agency just scratches their heads and says they don’t know anything about the other agency. They wouldn’t even know who to talk to over there.

A Senate panel will vote today on two budget bills for FY2012, one of which is for transportation and housing programs. The draft of the bill isn't available until after the subcommittee markup today, but Smart Growth America is calling attention to the fact that it's important to make sure the bill includes funding for the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, the partnership between USDOT, the EPA, and HUD.

This morning, President Obama announced that he would direct the EPA to back off of new ozone standards that would have saved an estimated 12,000 lives [PDF]. They’ll revisit it in 2013.

Where we live has an enormous impact on energy use, according to new research commissioned by the EPA. The report, "Location Efficiency and Housing Type -- Boiling It Down to BTUs" finds that Americans use far less energy if they live in an apartment building in a transit-oriented neighborhood than if they live in a detached suburban house, even if that house has green building features and sports fuel-efficient cars in the driveway.

When Don White was young, his dad would drive him from the Boston area to Blue Hill, Maine up coastal Route 1. “In those days,” he reminisces, “the road wound through little, small towns. And some of that has been bypassed.”

If you want to get a sense of how devastating sprawl has been to the urban areas of northeast Ohio, head over to Woodlawn Avenue in East Cleveland. Between the rows of boarded up buildings, a house collapses onto itself. Graffiti pays homage to dead loved ones — “R.I.P. Fife.” Nearby, stuffed animals have been stapled to a telephone pole in a memorial, presumably, to a dead child.