The Environmental Protection Agency announced yesterday that they have given a permit to a company to drill in the Arctic.  This permit, it should be noted, does not give the company the right to drill.  Oil corporations still are waiting on both other permits and court rulings in their favor to allow drilling to proceed.  However, the Associated Press reports,

The EPA permit allows Shell Offshore Inc., a subsidiary of Dutch-owned Royal Dutch Shell PLC, to release up to 245 tons of nitrogen oxides at each of its drilling sites in the Beaufort Sea.

That’s roughly equivalent to the amount produced by 1,500 school buses each year, EPA officials said.

Shell’s exploratory drilling project will meet all “health-based ambient air quality standards,” said Rick Albright, director of EPA’s Air, Waste and Toxics office in Seattle.

Lovely.  So the permit caps nitrogen oxide levels, but does not do the same for carbon dioxide.  Which is, you know, melting the Arctic ice.  We’ve discussed the EPA a couple times here before, so it’s not like this decision should come as a surprise, but it seems like there might be some repercussions from this one.  It should also be noted this decision can be appealed. 

You can takepart by checking out Greenpeace’s global warming page, which deals extensively with Arctic drilling and the problems it could create.