Only China is a worse polluter, ahead of the US. China emits about 6,018 million tons of greenhouse gases per year. The US follows with 5,903 tons. The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst has released a new list of the worse US polluters. The top three polluters are American Electric Power, Duke Energy and Southern Company. AEP emits the equivalent of 130 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, accounting for about 2% of the annual total, with Duke at 127 million tons and Southern Co. at 118 million. It’s abundantly clear from looking at this list that coal-burning power plants are the biggest single-point carbon emitters in the country. To put this into terms we can more closely identify with — the average human, at least according to this calculation, emits roughly 200 kilograms of carbon dioxide per year from breathing. That implies that AEP is emitting about as much carbon dioxide as the breathing of 650 million people.
Ending Corporate hits-and-runs in the United States 
An Earthjustice win brings us a big step closer to ensuring that the dirtiest polluters in the country pay for their own toxic messes, instead of skipping town and leaving taxpayers with the bill.
Apr.7.─ Time and time again, we’ve seen big industrial polluters emit toxic pollution that poisons the people and ecosystems nearby. And time and time again, we’ve seen these polluters walk away from the bill, leaving taxpayers to fund the cleanup and communities to live with the contamination.
That’s not right.
But there’s good news. In a groundbreaking Earthjustice victory following nearly eight years of litigation, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the EPA to get moving on rules that will break this cycle.
Once finalized, the rules will help ensure that the worst industrial polluters are on the hook for their own messes. By making sure they know they won’t be able to pass the buck to the taxpayers when the time comes, companies will have every reason to clean up their act and avoid making such a mess in the first place.
The EPA must make these rules under the authority of the so-called “Superfund” law, passed by Congress in 1980 in response to the growing threat of leaking and abandoned toxic waste sites like Love Canal in New York state. The law sought to allocate funding to clean up the many horribly contaminated sites already in existence. But it also sought to reduce the risk of creating new sites in the future.
To that end, the law directed the EPA to create rules requiring “financial assurances” from the nation’s dirtiest industries. Financial assurances include bonds, insurance or other financial mechanisms that ensure that the companies most likely to make toxic messes will be able to pay to clean them up ...
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