CCAN is fighting dirty power plants on BOTH sides of the Potomac River! On June 26 2009, CCAN joined three Maryland citizens in a lawsuit challenging the Mirant Corporation’s Chalk Point power plant on the Patuxent River in Prince George’s County for not complying with state and federal Clean Air Act pollution control requirements.

From the very beginning, CCAN has been involved in challenging proposed coal-fired power plants across Virginia. Now, we are taking on new legal challenges

For the past seven years, CCAN has been dedicated to grassroots organizing in an effort to bring about policy changes at the local, state and federal levels that curb global warming pollution. Our mission is also to foster a rapid transition away from dirty fossil fuel-based electricity. We see it as an integral part of our mission to enforce existing air pollution laws against dirty emitters, like Mirant, as much as possible. It’s key to foster a culture of enforcement at every level of government to ensure that climate change pollution standards are met in the future.

This past April, Maryland helped pass one of the strongest statewide caps on global warming pollution in the country. Here’s the question, though: If corporations like Mirant can get away with violating laws that regulate air pollutants we can see and feel in our lungs, how can we expect them to follow laws meant to limit a colorless, odorless pollutant like carbon dioxide? The traditional air pollutants have been regulated since the 1970s and yet these old power plants still fail to meet basic pollution control requirements nearly forty years later. We need to hold the corporations that run these dirty fossil fuel plants accountable now!

By challenging the plants that violate current Clean Air Act standards, we hope to force them to switch to cleaner fuels. Because of provisions included in both the Maryland carbon cap and the climate bill just passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, older plants will not be regulated for carbon dioxide