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news release.
Every power plant in the country could increase its pollution under a proposed EPA rule announced today, resulting in more than 70,000 additional deaths nationwide from power plant pollution by 2025. The rule would adopt industry-backed changes to the Clean Air Act’s New Source Review (NSR) program that allow aging power plants to increase pollution without installing modern pollution controls. Power plants are by far the largest industrial source of air pollution in the country.
“The Bush administration is making its most radical move yet to gut the New Source Review program,” said Diane E. Brown, Executive Director of the Arizona Public Interest Research Group (Arizona PIRG). “The administration is now trying to do by regulation what it failed to do by legislation in the House of Representatives last week.”
On Friday, October 7, the House of Representatives narrowly passed an energy bill after its sponsors dropped a provision that would have codified—and expanded to all industrial facilities—the same NSR rollbacks for power plants that the administration now seeks to implement in its proposed rule. Joe Barton (R-TX), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and chief sponsor of the bill, admitted during the markup of the bill on September 28 that the NSR rollback was the administration’s “primary request” for the bill and was included only at the administration’s behest. NSR repeal is also the centerpiece of the administration’s air pollution bill, the so-called “Clear Skies” initiative, which is currently stalled in the Senate.
Many of the nation’s power plants were built decades ago and use few, if any, modern pollution controls. Power plant soot pollution already causes more than 23,000 premature deaths per year. An analysis released last week by Arizona PIRG shows that eliminating the NSR program for power plants would result in more than 70,000 additional deaths nationwide by 2025. The Clean Air Task Force conducted the analysis based on data from Abt Associates, the EPA’s own air quality consultants, using standard EPA methodology.
Under the Clean Air Act, a power plant must install pollution controls if it upgrades or expands in ways that increase the plant’s actual annual emissions. Under the proposed rule, the plant would have to install pollution controls only if the changes increase how much pollution it could potentially emit per hour. These changes to the NSR program would effectively exempt power plants from NSR, allowing them to increase their actual emissions without installing any pollution controls.
The EPA previously rejected this very approach, stating in a December 2002 NSR rule that it “could lead to unreviewed increases in emissions that would be detrimental to air quality and could make it difficult to implement the statutory requirements for state-of-the-art [pollution] controls.” Moreover, the EPA’s own enforcement office concluded that the proposed rule “will adversely impact our enforcement cases” and that, under the proposal, “as written NSR would never be triggered.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit also recently rejected this approach in a decision handed down in June in the case New York v. EPA, ruling that “the plain language of the Clean Air Act indicates that Congress intended to apply NSR to changes that increase actual emissions instead of potential or allowable emissions.”
The Bush administration issued rules in 2002 and 2003 to weaken the NSR program, but the new proposed rule is by far the most significant of the rollbacks, according to Brown.
“If this rule goes forward, Arizonans will suffer more asthma attacks, more heart problems, and more deaths,” said Brown.
