"For the roughly 130 power plants, refineries and other facilities embroiled in the air permitting dispute between U.S. EPA and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, a new program being finalized by EPA could allow them to get on with business as usual.

The world's two largest environmental agencies have been scrapping for months over 'flexible permitting,' a 16-year-old system used by Texas to craft permits for some of the state's largest industrial facilities. Rather than placing an emissions limit on each source of pollution -- at larger plants, there can be thousands of them -- the permits set an overall cap and let companies decide how to get there."

Gabriel Nelson reports for Greenwire September 21, 2010. [2]