No More Freebies at EPA

After eight years in which the EPA was the Environmental Pass
Agency, new administrator Lisa Jackson last week sent a new signal that
polluters cannot pass "Go." In a memorandum, she stopped the agency's
nearly decade-old "Performance Track" program where corporations set
voluntary environmental goals. It began late in the Clinton
administration, on the notion that with "a growing number of
environmental leaders in the public and private sectors practicing
environmental stewardship, we hope more organizations and the people
who run them will begin to see its advantages."

Corporations
saw the "advantages" as an open chimney. In December, the Philadelphia
Inquirer published an expose on the program, which grew in the Bush EPA
to 547 members. The EPA signed up many of the nation's top polluters in
a polluted public relations stunt. The companies said they were
greening, even as the EPA made little or no effort to verify any
progress. The Inquirer found that signatories could count on fewer
inspections and expedited permits to expand.

In a memorandum,
Jackson wrote to the Performance Track members that while they "have
created a foundation of achievement, innovation, and progress," she was
halting the program because it "was developed in a different era and
may not speak to today's challenges." She elaborated in a telephone
interview last week, "There's enough concerns about that program's
effectiveness. My current belief is that it has raised awareness of
stewardship. I can also say with some certainty that evidence of the
effectiveness of Performance Track is not out there."

The degree
to which Performance Track became Polluter Travesty is the fact that
many of its members are in the 2008 Toxic 100 Index, as compiled by the
Political Economy Research Institute at UMass-Amherst. DuPont and Dow
are members despite being listed top and third in the nation,
respectively, for their toxic releases into the air. In 2005 DuPont
paid a $10.25 million fine and agreed to a $107 million settlement to
people in Ohio and West Virginia for polluting drinking water.

The
Inquirer found that a chlorine factory in Tennessee was a Performance
Track member despite being the biggest mercury emitter in the state,
with the state declaring the Hiwassee River abutted by the factory to
be "impaired." The newspaper also found that Pfizer,
also on the UMass institute's Toxic 100 list, is a Performance Track
member despite having paid a nearly $1 million fine for hazardous
chemical release and that Marathon Oil, in the Toxic 100 and a
Performance Track member, received expedited permits in 2006 to expand
its Louisiana refinery into the fourth largest in the nation.

Evidence
of the coziness between the polluters and EPA is a series of 2006
testimonials on the Performance Track website. The environmental
manager for Nucor Steel, a Toxic
100 member, wrote, "The best thing about Performance Track is that it's
truly a partnership between business and EPA." A representative from
Marathon Oil hailed the "collaborative relationship with our
regulators." An environmental resource representative from DuPont wrote
"Instead of reinventing the wheel, we can have a dialogue."

The
whole point of the "dialogue" was so polluters did not have to reinvent
anything. Jackson knew this, which is why she added Performance Track
to the many Bush policies she is reversing or reviewing. The mere
consideration by the Obama administration to regulate greenhouse gases
has the US Chamber of Commerce screaming it would "completely shut the
country down." Jackson said such fears are unfounded.

"We are not
looking to run rampant and regulate every Dunkin' Donuts and every
cow," Jackson said. "These are nightmare, worst-case scenarios put up
by the Bush administration. We will move methodically as mandated by
the Supreme Court. But the fact is, we don't have a very sound
rationale on regulating mercury . . . there is quite a bit of
uncertainty about how we regulate air pollutants. Decades after the
Clean Air Act we're stalled on toxic waste sites. The Superfund
pipeline has dried up . . . We've lost eight years on kids getting
asthma."

Just to have an EPA administrator admit to all that gives hope that the days of the free pass are over.