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Governors, Environmentalists, and Health Advocates Fume Over Bush's Last Minute Air Pollution Rule
WASHINGTON - A bipartisan group of six Northeastern governors is urging the Bush administration to abandon a plan that would relax pollution control requirements on power plants, saying the proposed rule would increase air pollution and threaten public health.
Dominion Energy's Brayton Point power plant in Massachusetts burns coal, oil and natural gas. (Photo by Alexey Sergeev)
The concerns raised by the governors echo worries expressed by
environmentalists and public health advocates, who also fear the Bush
administration is keen to push through additional industry-friendly air
rules before leaving office on January 20, 2009.
The regulation that has drawn the ire of the Northeastern governors would change a key part of the Clean Air Act's New Source Review, NSR, program, which was created to ensure that owners of older power plants would modernize pollution controls when they make modifications to facilities that result in increased emissions.
Currently, the NSR requirements are triggered when a power plant makes an upgrade that will result in an increase in annual emissions. The Bush administration's proposal would change that test, exempting facilities from NSR if the modifications do not change in the plant's hourly emissions.
"What might appear to be a simple word change could have an enormous - and ominous - impact," said Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell. "Using hourly instead of annual emissions as the threshold for a New Source Review and the installation of pollution control devices stands the intent of the Clean Air Act on its head."
Rell, along with fellow Republican governors Donald Carcieri of Rhode Island and James Douglas of Vermont, sent a letter on Friday outlining these concerns to the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
A trio of Democratic govenors - Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, John Lynch of New Hampshire and John Baldacci of Maine - also signed the letter.
The governors, repeating concerns raised by environmentalists, public health advocacy groups and state air pollution regulators, contend the proposal ignores reality.
The proposal would force federal regulators to "effectively disregard" the fact that although a modification to a plant may not boost hourly emissions, it would be very likely to boost annual emissions by allowing it to operate for longer hours, the governors wrote.
"This would result in a net detriment, not a net benefit, to public health and environmental quality," according to the November 21 letter.
The letter also noted that when the Bush administration first proposed the rule change in October 2005, it argued that two other new rules developed to cut power plant emissions would ensure older plants installed newer pollution controls. But those two regulations - the Clean Air Interstate Rule and the Clean Air Mercury Rule - have been rejected by federal courts.
If the rule change is finalized, Rell said her state would "pursue every available legal option" to overturn it.
"We have worked far too hard to improve the quality of the air we breathe," Rell said. "We cannot - and will not - allow our progress to be undermined by the actions of an EPA that has lost sight of its mission."
But the window for finalizing the new regulation is closing. The EPA has yet to send the rule to the White House Office of Management and Budget for final review.
But there are still at least a few weeks before the door closes on the possibility the rule becomes reality - any regulation deemed to have no significant economic impact enters into effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register.
This means the Bush administration has until at least December 19 to publish rules that will become final before President-elect Barack Obama takes office.
And regulatory experts believe that overturning rules finalized by that date could be difficult, potentially requiring EPA to go through another rulemaking process, something that could take months or even years.
The concern has environmentalists and public health groups on high alert, with worries over other possible changes to the NSR program, including a revision that would weaken Clean Air Act protections for national parks and wilderness areas.
That regulation centers on requirements originally developed to limit increases in air pollution that affects parks, wildlife refuges and other "Class 1" scenic areas afforded special protections under the Clean Air Act.
The proposal, which is currently under review by the Office of Management and Budget, would alter how regulators measure pollution levels near these areas.
Currently, levels are measured over three hour and 24 hour periods - the Bush administration's change would call for levels to be averaged over a year.
Critics contend this would undercount the levels of air pollution, permitting power plants and other industrial facilities to emit more pollution. Opponents also worry the rule change could make it easier to build new power plants near parks and other Class 1 areas.
Documents publicized by the "Washington Post" last week indicate that at least half of the EPA's 10 regional administrators have formally protested against the idea, raising concerns it would allow the significant deterioration of air quality in some of the nation's most pristine areas.
The administration has ignored calls by several key lawmakers - including the new chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, California Democrat Henry Waxman, to abandon the plan.
The EPA could issue the New Source Review rule as soon as this week.
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15 Comments so far
Show AllThe regime of George Wanker Bush has always been primarily about death. It will remain that way until the end. The death of one person, said Stalin, is a tragedy. The deaths of millions is a statistic. The Great Texas Worm couldn't have said it better himself.
The Bushwacker must have stolen the election in 2004, because I just cannot believe there are that many uninformed voters and sophomoric, morons in the U.S. Bush has a reverse Midas touch, everything he touches turns to *&^#! You wonder how much more damage he can do until the nightmare is over!
reverse midas touch!! Lol!
Worms and Bush have nothing in common. Worms are peaceful and caretakers.
Bush is 100 percent human.
Al Gore should feel some shame that he didnt fight the election of 2000 more vigorously, given Bush's known environmental record at the time.
In the senate he could have voted to investigate the Florida vote, but didnt.
If it was Cheney there, he would have had no qualms about doing something to benefit himself.
Webber: Al Gore was Vice President when he ran against Bush in 2000. There are only two (2) duties required of the Vice President in the Constitution: 1) to replace the President in the case of his incapacitation or death and 2) to vote in the Senate in the case of a tie. In other words, he could NOT have voted to investigate the Florida vote in the Senate.
Profit health comes ahead of People health, Environmentally and Medically. Appalachia is a toxic third world waste dump and the acceptable standards of health care in East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia are abysmal. It's called "horrifying" but quite acceptable in East Tennessee !
http://www.wisecountyissues.com
Another last minute regulation (or lack of it) is to allow companies like Monsanto that produce genetically-modified products to do their own testing. The FDA will accept it as valid. The "fox in the henhouse" syndrome.
Also, the FDA can disallow any interstate shipping of supplements if they contain any substance that has ever been questioned in any paper regardless of whether or not the findings were later found to be invalid.
I have always believed in respect for the law. I'm 72 and have never even had a speeding ticket. All respect is gone. I am now willing to break any law in this fascist state.
http://www.repoweramerica.org/page/s/epa
Repower America.org has a letter writing campaign for public comment to the EPA -
3 days left for responses to EPA call for public comment on CO2 emissions “endanger the public health and welfare”
Repower America.org has a letter writing campaign for public comment to the EPA
"...until the nightnare is over..."
I only wish it were that simple. But it just isn't.
The Nightmare we call Bush didn't start with him and it won't end with his end.
All the horrors that have come, over generations, to constitute the American Nightmare (the entrenched mindless greed, the infinite official lying, the religiously sanctified plunder and violent sociopathy of the ruling class -- to say nothing of the mass ignorance, passivity, and, often enough, collusion of the victim public with the ruling class)--all these are multiply-established thread-lines, now interwoven along with the Good into the fabric, the gestalt of US Society.
What official and much of unofficial America is Today, is not unlike that design of semi-Maddness which Herakles' wife slowly, over many years, wove into her rug, despairingly awaiting The Virtuous Hero's return.
While it's wrong and useless to become numbly cynical about all of this (life and virtue, after all, still demand action grounded in pure Hope), it's also fatal to the goal of virtuous change to not recognize and name what America has become and now Is: A meta-social Being whose imblanced mixture of dim light and deep dark allows the dark to remain decisively and disastrously in control.
Bush is (soon to be was) merely the most visible, momentary outline of the poisoned and weakening threads that lie deep within America's otherwise presumably-decently intended weave.
When Bush personally disappears, the nightmare may well seem to relent and these corrupt threads in our national fabric may become less visible (Bush was 'very good' in illuminating them..).
But they will still be very much there: still undermining and poisoning the cloth, still very much in need of reckoning, removal, and replacement by healthy, humane strands.
Excellent,intelligent post. Thanks, logos nine.
Dubya is trying to maximize the damage done by Dick Cheney's clandestine 2001 energy policy. Although the formal policy has never been disclosed, nearly 8 years of extreme deregulation and corporate welfare for the petro-chemical, coal and nuclear industries tell the story.
A classical case of 'Burned Soil'. Destroy everything when You leave.
Even though I doubt that the Nazis 'deserve' the credit for the principle,
they employed it extensively. Now it has been revived on the political
level. The consequences will be the same.
Yet, all this can be reversed.
Helena-Sophia Watson 'Female Mind Over Matter'
Statistically, there's supposed to be one psychopath in every 100 people. If that follows for presidents, we should rejoice when Bush 43 is finally out and some sanity (compassion, empathy, accountability, integrity, logic...) is back in the White house for 57 more administrations.
In Europe the rate of psychopaths is 1 in 2500, in the US it's 1 in 25.
Never satisified with his unprecedented sellouts to special interests, this arrogant zealot is now sprinting to the finish line in his war against our planet to conclude the final chapter of his abusive presidency, Sadly our legislators have defaulted their duties by tolerating these crimes. The returning legislators, who had been complacent during these abuses, should be chatisized and denied re-election. Members of the departing administration and congress, who assume lucritive positions with the industries they supported, will be violating the law--and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent.
These final crimes can be successfully checked only by swift and persistent action from a concerned and motivated citizenry. Remember the 9/11 investigation that Bush so vehemently opposed while an intiminated congress balked. This happened only because of the perservence of the victim's relatives, albeit their success was limited by impairments from the Bush team.
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