CO2 rules reviewed

The Obama administration's Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday that it will reconsider a memo issued in the final weeks of the Bush administration that may have eased approval of new coal-fired power plants.

Stephen Johnson, head of the EPA under former President George W. Bush, had issued a memorandum in December saying heat-trapping carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant that the agency can regulate when approving power plants.

Johnson issued the memo a month after an EPA appeals panel, siding with environmentalists, blocked approval of a coal plant in Utah because the developers failed to consider controls on the emissions linked to global warming. The permit for Deseret Power Electric Cooperative's 110-megawatt plant in eastern Utah was the first to have been approved by the EPA after a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that carbon dioxide could be controlled under the Clean Air Act.

The Sierra Club and other environmental groups had petitioned the EPA, asking that the Johnson memo be nullified.