China has imposed tougher quality standards on imported coal as part of its efforts to prop up domestic prices and reduce oversupply on the market.
State media reported earlier this month that more than 3,600 toy exporters or 53% of the industry, had shuttered in the past two years because of a rising yuan, more expensive raw materials, slowing market growth and tougher quality standards.
Mike Kilburn, head of environmental strategy at Civic Exchange, said that city officials had been "dithering" and "fudging the issue," and that they have "forfeited Hong Kong's position as the pacesetter for introducing tougher air quality standards in China".
The first was a 1999 decision by a three-judge federal appeals panel that had invalidated tough new air quality standards imposed by Ms. Browner to force major reductions in the amount of ozone and soot in the air.
Before the court is a controversial 2-to-1 decision by a federal appellate panel last year that invalidated tough new air quality standards that the federal Environmental Protection Agency imposed in 1997 to force further reductions in the amounts of ozone and soot in the air.
Dozens of British beaches and lakes are at risk of failing to meet tougher European water quality standards this summer.
Automakers sell P.Z.E.V.'s only where they are mandated, in California and those states that have adopted its tough air-quality standards, Massachusetts, New York and Vermont.
Browner, a lawyer by training, pushed for tough air-quality standards and fought polluting industries' efforts to curtail the new rules all the way to the US supreme court.
Liberals have grown frustrated by some of his actions, like the decision this month to drop tougher air-quality standards.
Daniel Diaz Zapata, a spokesman for Verizon, noted that service quality standards in New York are among the toughest in the nation.
