While the Senate drags its feet on climate change legislation, the Obama administration's Environment Protection Agency is picking up the slack. In the past year, the EPA issued a long-anticipated ruling that greenhouse gases threaten public health and the environment, giving regulators leeway to place limits on carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. It has also strengthened smog standards, calculated the indirect land-use effects of corn-based ethanol, depoliticized the department's employment policies, and enforced safeguards requiring substantial reductions in toxic air pollution (including mercury) from the nation’s coal plant fleet. Moreover, bureaucrats are shedding light on new environmental dangers, such as the metal plating industry, which is dumping high levels of the chemicals into sewers in Chicago and Cleveland. For more on these fights, be sure to read Tim Dickinson's Rolling Stone profile of EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, who he calls "the most progressive EPA chief in history."