Let’s face it; the Environmental Protection Agency hasn’t had a good spring. Since late-April, the agency has averaged about one scandalous embarrassment a week.
The last week in April, the EPA thought it would be a good idea to meet with oil-industry officials altered its regulation policies to benefit a Bush “pioneer.” Less than a week after that, the LA Times discovered the EPA approving a new air-pollution regulation that will greatly benefit the wood-products industry by relying on a “risk assessment generated by a chemical industry-funded think tank.”
And the hits just keep on coming…
Today, the Wall Street Journal reported that an EPA clean-air rule was somehow deleted from proposed regulations.
A section of a proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule that would have given a boost to gas and nuclear power plants turned up missing, accelerating a high-stakes battle among the nation’s utilities.
The deletion favors states and utilities that have many coal-fired power plants, including a number of swing states important in the November election including Ohio, Michigan and Iowa.
What a coincidence.
The circumstances sound a little bizarre, even for the Bush administration.
The conventional approach tends to favor dirtier, coal-fired power plants. On May 11, the EPA released a draft of the new rule, which included a section calling for discussion of an alternative way to allocate limits on pollution. That alternative would have given larger allocations to utilities with the most-efficient energy output, a change that would favor cleaner, gas-fired, hydroelectric and nuclear utilities.
Lobbyists for utilities favoring the change were shocked last month when the language proposing consideration of the output measure disappeared in the final draft, as approved by the White House Office of Management and Budget. “This has been a strange development,” said Michael J. Bradley, director of the Clean Energy Group, which represents a dozen utilities. He said the difference in methods of allocation could mean “tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars to large utilities.”
Asked for an explanation, an OMB spokesperson had “no immediate comment,” while EPA spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said she had “no immediate explanation for the deletion.”
That’s comforting.