Nobody could ever seriously accuse the Bush administration of being too aggressive when it comes to enforcing the nation's environmental laws. But it was partly on those grounds that a federal court last week struck down the Clean Air Interstate Rule, a regulation aimed at reducing soot and smog and one of the few creative initiatives to emerge from the Environmental Protection Agency in the last seven years.

Exelon, the electric company based in Chicago, will promise on Tuesday to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 by an amount larger than its total emissions in 2008, in a bid to shape the debate on carbon dioxide rules and to get a jump on compliance.

Police are doing more patrolling on bikes here, while elsewhere across America small towns are taking unusual measures to rein in rising energy costs. One Connecticut town plans to put century-old dams back to work generating electricity, while other communities are telling workers to turn off their vehicles when stopped, instead of letting them idle. Gasoline and heating oil prices have soared, electricity has grown more expensive and health-care costs keep rising, prompting municipalities to do what they can to cut costs.

Aldo DeRubeis bought compact fluorescent bulbs on Monday at the Home Depot in New Rochelle, N.Y. Sales of compact fluorescents climbed to 75 million last year for the retailer. Recycling them is about to get easier. Home Depot, the nation's second-largest retailer, will announce on Tuesday that it will take back old compact fluorescents in all 1,973 of its stores in the United States, creating the nation's most widespread recycling program for the bulbs.

The world's top oil producers and consumers convene in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia tomorrow to grapple with record high oil prices, with some OPEC members baulking at consumer demands for more crude. While Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, was widely expected to announce an output hike at the meeting, OPEC president Chakib Khelil slammed consumer pressure for a production increase to take pressure off soaring prices. "To ask the oil producers to increase their output is illogical and irrational," Khelil was quoted as saying today by the Algerian news service APS.

The economy remained