New pollution rules achieve balance for environment and the economy.
September 2, 2003
If you want to lessen the chances of future blackouts and keep the prices you pay to utility companies reasonable, you'll love the Environmental Protection Agency's new rules on emissions at power plants and other industries.
And if air pollution is your concern, don't fear. The rules won't cause it to increase. It will in fact continue its beneficent decrease.
Of course, you would not guess as much by listening to some environmental groups, which make the decision by the Bush administration sound like one more of its many devious plots to pull in campaign contributions while poisoning air, land and sea. What is really going on in the administration is something practical and sensible.
In the 1970s, Congress passed laws requiring tough standards on new power plants, but let older power plants off the hook unless they undertook major new upgrades.
Because such upgrades would have to abide by the standards, some companies avoided those improvements, even when work was sorely needed. The result: inefficiency, higher costs and lower reliability. And when plants tried to squeak by on "routine maintenance," expensive lawsuits ensued.
The new EPA rules, though less restrictive, don't say anything goes. No plant can increase emissions beyond limits already spelled out in permits, an official has told the press, and there will still be a point beyond which tougher standards kick in.
But the rules clarify what is acceptable and will thereby prompt more energy creation, which is badly needed. There's research showing that air pollution will continue to decline. Meanwhile, the administration is working on another policy to bring pollution down even more.
All of this may strike some people as the end of the Earth, but must surely strike others as just plain old common sense.
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