http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=536&ncid=536&e=11&u=/ap/20030824/ap_on_go_ot/clean_air_rules_3
EPA
to Ease Plants' Air Pollution Rules
Sun Aug 24, 2003, 9:20 AM ET
By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated
Press Writer
WASHINGTON - In a victory
for industrial plant operators,
the Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to issue
a new rule within days to let thousands more facilities
modernize without adding more pollution controls.
The new rule relaxes
the agency's definition of "routine
maintenance," a catch-phrase Congress adopted in its 1977
Clean Air Act amendments to describe the only reason an
industry could modernize without having to install
best-available pollution control technology.
"Routine maintenance"
has been at the center of debate
over the Clean Air Act's "new source review" program,
which was intended to force businesses to install new
clean-air devices if they modified or improved older
plants in ways that increase emissions.
Bush administration
members and industry officials
who lobbied heavily for the changes describe them
as clarifications of a confusing standard that has
long stymied industry. The new source review program
needs improving, said the EPA's acting administrator,
Marianne L. Horinko, because "that program is not causing
a whole lot of emissions reductions."
Horinko said she will
sign the new rule, which is based on
EPA's proposal last November, in the coming week and it will
take effect in the fall. The announcement is planned for
Wednesday.
"This rule is
desperately needed to make America's power
plants, factories and refineries safe and reliable," said
Jeffrey Marks, director of air quality policy for the
National Association of Manufacturers.
Scott Segal, a lobbyist
and attorney for six large utilities,
said even the new allowance for replacement costs wouldn't
fix all the shortcomings in the new source review program,
but it would "move us along the path of improving efficiency
and reliability of the electric power system."
Environmentalists,
Democrats and other critics contend the
rule change is a giveaway to utilities and industry, allowing
many of the nation's dirtiest coal-burning power plants and
other facilities to release millions of tons of additional
pollution into the air.
"This latest rule
on NSR is just one more flagrant violation
of the Clean Air Act and every court's opinion on this matter,"
said Sen. James Jeffords (news - web sites), I-Vt., the No. 2
senator on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
"This
is the single most destructive anti-clean air rule
in the history of the Clean Air Act," said Vickie Patton,
a senior attorney in Boulder, Colo., for New York-based
Environmental Defense, an advocacy group.
Some critics also have
suggested the EPA announcement
on the new rule was being moved up so that it would
be out of the way if a Senate confirmation hearing
begins next month for Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt,
President Bush's nominee to succeed former EPA
Administrator Christie Whitman. Horinko flatly
denied that, saying "this was moving back when
Whitman was here."
Horinko and other Bush
administration officials have been
largely silent on details of the new rule, fueling broad
speculation about how much of a plant's modernization might
be considered exempt. Administration officials said only
that the percentage - which one environmental group put
at 20 percent based on a leaked draft of the new rule
- was still subject to change.
"The concern about
air emissions is way off-base," said
James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council
on Environmental Quality. Still, he said the routine
maintenance exemption "will be 50 percent or less,
because that's what we proposed."
The EPA issued other
changes to the new source review
program last December that eased pollution-control
requirements for utilities, oil companies and manufacturers.
But the administration said last month it would briefly
reconsider parts of those new rules, after several
environmental groups and states downwind from the
biggest industrial sources of air pollution sued
to overturn them because of concern for public health.
Those parts include
the length of time permitted between
pollution-control upgrades, record-keeping and pollution
reporting, and the way emissions are calculated.
___
On the Net:
New source review:
http://www.epa.gov/nsr
Environmental Defense:
http://www.environmentaldefense.org
