Rollback on Clean Air
January 9, 2002
"It is a bad idea, one of several to emerge from Vice President Dick
Cheney's task force on energy last spring.
A proposal to weaken an
important provision in the
Clean Air Act is making its way to
the White House for a final
decision by President Bush. The recommendation, from the
Energy Department and The Environmental Protection
Agency, is variously described as "tentative" and "informal"
- in any case, not final. One can only hope so. It is a bad
idea, one of several to emerge from Vice President Dick
Cheney's task force on energy last spring. By rejecting it, the
administration can spare itself the kind of embarrassment it
suffered when it tried to roll back the Clinton
administration's arsenic standard last year.
At issue is a complicated section of the Clean Air Act
known as new source review.
The provision requires existing power
plants to install modern controls whenever they are
significantly upgraded or expanded, putting them on a par
with new, cleaner plants. This was aimed mainly at
hundreds of aging, coal-fired power plants that were
exempted from the original act's stringent regulations in the
expectation that they would soon be retired. Most of them
are still going strong, contributing to smog and acid rain.
Plants in the Midwest send so much pollution eastward on
the prevailing winds that it is almost impossible for states
like New York and New Jersey to meet federal clean air
standards.
This windblown pollution - which will surely increase if new
source review is weakened without an adequate substitute
- accounts for the presence in Washington yesterday of the
attorneys general of nine Eastern states, including New
York's Eliot Spitzer. They urged the administration not to
undermine the law. They also warned that weakening new
source review would compromise lawsuits filed in 1999
against utilities that they said had been breaking the law by
upgrading old plants without installing the necessary
controls.
New source review applies to all industrial sectors, including
the oil, gas and chemical industries. But the big utilities
with old coal-fired plants have complained the loudest. They
say the law is vague, requiring expensive controls even when
only routine maintenance is involved. They also say that the
law penalizes investments in efficiency, which is absurd on
its face. The law is triggered only when plants create more
pollution. Efficiency, in this context, means creating more
power without increasing pollution - not just making
maximum profits with minimum investment.
Without question, pollution controls are expensive. But the
country long ago said that it was willing to pay for cleaner
air. And new source review, if fully applied to all old plants,
could lead to truly remarkable reductions in chemicals that
produce smog and acid rain, as much as 80 percent in the
case of acid rain, according to an Energy Department study
in December 2000.
The main proponent of a rollback seems to be the energy
secretary, Spencer Abraham. Christie Whitman, the E.P.A.
administrator, who supported the law (and the 1999
lawsuits) when she was governor of New Jersey, is said to
favor modest adjustments aimed at clarifying the law.
Eastern senators, including James Jeffords of Vermont and
Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, want no changes unless
the administration comes up with an alternate plan that
achieves the same reductions or better. They are also
sufficiently alarmed by the rollback reports that they have
decided to summon Bush officials to testify. Perhaps the
administration can yet be persuaded of the error of its ways
nytimes.com |
