I know this will come as a surprise to absolutely no one, but the Bush gang wants to make it easier for power plants to pollute more.
The Bush administration has drafted regulations that would ease pollution controls on older, dirtier power plants and could allow those that modernize to emit more pollution, rather than less.
The language could undercut dozens of pending state and federal lawsuits aimed at forcing coal-fired plants to cut back emissions of harmful pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, said lawyers who worked on the cases.
The draft rules, obtained by The Washington Post from the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group, contradict the position taken by federal lawyers who have prosecuted polluting facilities in the past, and parallel the industry’s line of defense against those suits. The utilities, and the proposed new rules, take the position that decisions on whether a plant complies with the regulations after modernization should be based on how much pollution it could potentially emit per hour, rather than the current standard of how much it pollutes annually.
The drafted regulations would be almost comical if this weren’t so serious. The Bush proposal would allow plants to operate longer hours. As a result, they could conceivably increase the produced pollutants, but so long as the total is averaged out on a per-hour basis, the administration’s already-low standards would be met.
This is all part of the fight over something called “New Source Review,” which has been raging on for several years now. Discussion of the policy tends to be tedious and complicated, but the bottom line remains the same: in Clinton’s second term, the government was close to establishing policies that would force power plants to seriously reduce pollutants, while Bush quickly reversed course shortly after taking office.
Well, maybe “complicated” is the wrong word. Bruce Barcott wrote a terrific piece on it last year from the New York Times Magazine (the article, strangely enough, is still accessible online), in which he explains the process and the effect. It’s worth taking a moment (or two) to understand.
When Clinton administration officials were in the process of writing Clear Air regulations, they came up with a fairly straightforward standard. As plants made routine maintenance changes, they would be required to add pollution-control equipment. In time, all plants would complete the changes and cut emissions.
Bush didn’t change the standards, he changed the definitions for routine maintenance changes.
The new formula would not adopt [Sylvia Lowrance’s, who was the EPA’s top official for enforcement and compliance from 1996 to 2002] suggested threshold of 0.75 percent. Instead, [Marianne Horinko, Bush’s acting E.P.A. administrator] said, utilities would be allowed to spend up to 20 percent of a generating unit’s replacement cost, per year, without tripping the N.S.R. threshold.
In other words, a company that operated a coal-fired power plant could do just about anything it wanted to a $1 billion generating unit as long as the company didn’t spend more than $200 million a year on the unit. To E.P.A. officials who had worked on N.S.R. enforcement, who had pored over documents and knew what it cost to repair a generator, the new threshold was absurd. “What I don’t understand is why they were so greedy,” said Eric Schaeffer, the former E.P.A. official. “Five percent would have been too high, but 20? I don’t think the industry expected that in its wildest dreams.”
The framework of new-source review would remain, but the new rules set thresholds so high that pollution-control requirements would almost never come into effect. “It’s a moron test for power companies,” said Frank O’Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust, a nonprofit watchdog group. “It’s such a huge loophole that only a moron would trip over it and become subject to N.S.R. requirements.”
I sometimes wonder how these people sleep at night.