By issuing “voluntary environmental improvement bonds,”, local and state governments could
create special taxing districts that finance homeowner purchases of everything from solar panels to rain
gardens.
Federal officials ordered Indiana on Monday to rewrite an air permit for BP PLC’s Whiting refinery, concluding the state may
not have fully assessed all the new emissions a big expansion of the refinery will produce.
Chemical-maker Vertellus Specialties Inc. will spend up to $1.1 million and change air-emission monitoring practices at its
plant on the southwest side of Indianapolis under a proposed settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Bose McKinney & Evans’ defense of an Evansville company in a high-stakes environmental-contamination lawsuit has degenerated
into a fiasco, with a federal judge sanctioning both the client Red Spot Paint & Varnish Co. and law firm and ordering
each to pay half the plaintiff’s
legal bills.
Helped by a combination of plant closures and better emission controls, industrial air pollution in the nine-county region
has fallen 14 percent since the economic boom of the late 1990s, a federal database shows. But even with the reductions, the
metro area will struggle to comply with reduced ground-level ozone limits announced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
March 12.
