• Can the EPA Do Its Job (in an Election Year?) "The only thing worse than no E.P.A. is an E.P.A. that exists and doesn't do its job -- it becomes just a placebo," says EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson in a profile in the NYT. The profile takes as its hook the recent Supreme Court ruling that the EPA must be the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions -- while at the same time the agency is Enemy No. 1 for Republicans in the run-up to the 2012 federal elections.

• An Oil Spill Unfolds in Slow-Mo: I was away for the long weekend, so didn't see the first confirmation of a big oil spill in northeastern China. Going through the news today I was able to not only see the first reports of that spill -- attributed to ConocoPhilips China -- which took nearly a month to be made public, but also the nearly inevitable upward estimates of the damage: "On Tuesday the agency said that two separate spills on June 4 and 17 contaminated an 840-square-kilometer area of the Bohai Sea — more than four times the original 200 square-km that the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), the majority stakeholder in the field, first said were affected." Elsewhere: About 42,000 barrels of oil were spilled from an ExxonMobil operation in Montana into the Yellowstone River.

• Flying the Capped-and-Traded Skies: The European Union's highest court this week has begun hearing a case that would require air travel originating in the U.S. and headed to Europe to pay to offset the greenhouse gas emissions of that flight. American-based airlines, predictably, are fighting the regulations, which were adopted in 2008 and only now approaching enforcement.

• Tap This: American Water today released its first corporate responsibility report, revealing several opportunities the company will pursue to improve performance and lower its environmental footprint. Among the highlights: 92 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions come from purchased electricity used primarily to pump water from its source to process facilities and customers. Those pumps are terribly inefficient, but replacing them could improve pump efficiency as much as 20 percent, helping the company meet a mid-term goal of reducing its greenhouse gas intensity by as much as 8 percent. (We profiled CEO Jeff Sterba earlier this year.)

• Pollution's Silver Lining? China's ravenous appetite for coal has worried environmentalists for years, doubling between 2003 and 2007 and leading to that infamous white China sky. A new study out this week, however, contends that sulfur particle-induced haze may have had the unintended effect of offsetting some of the warming expected as a result of growing greenhouse gases, Time reports. "It wouldn't even be the first time that had happened -- there was a similar slowdown in warming during the 30 years following World War II as the global economy boomed on the back of fossil fuels, only to see warming pick up as pollution controls kicked in and companies installed scrubbers in coal-fired power plants."

• Just When You Thought It was Safe to Eat Sprouts: In the wake of a massive E. coli outbreak in Europe, you'd expect that government watchdogs the world over would be stepping up their surveillance of potentially susceptible foodstuffs. Not so, at least in the U.S. The Chicago Tribune reports that Congress is actually working to "end funding for the 10-year-old Microbiological Data Program, which tests about 15,000 annual samples of vulnerable produce such as sprouts, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, cantaloupe and cilantro for pathogens including salmonella and E. coli."

_{Lisa Jackson photo CC-licensed by ChesapeakeBayEO.}