The Bush administrations is advancing plans to weaken air-pollution rules for power plants, despite House Oversight Committee Chair Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) warning the EPA not to last week, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Under "new-source review" rules as they currently stand, power plants making upgrades that would keep their facilities operating more hours each day and increase overall emissions have to install new pollution-control equipment. The Bush administration's proposal would allow older power plants to upgrade without installing costly new equipment, as long as the hourly emissions rates don't increase. Duke Energy tried to make a case that the law should be interpreted this way before the Supreme Court last year, and lost.
EPA spokesperson Jonathan Shradar told the Journal that "work continues" on the rulemaking and "no timeframe has been set" for finalizing it, but some sources report that the administration wants to finalize the rule as soon as next week.
On Friday, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chair of the Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety, sent a letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson calling the administration's proposals "flawed." The senators strongly cautioned the agency against moving forward on the rule.
"Given the weight of evidence against the rule, if the EPA does promulgate the rule, this Committee may be compelled to undertake extensive investigation and oversight of the agency's and its officials' conduct and actions in connection with the promulgation of the rule," they wrote.
In his letter to Johnson last week, Waxman cautioned that the proposed change would likely wind up in long and costly legal wrangling, noting that of the 27 new rules regarding the Clean Air Act that have come out of the Bush EPA, 18 have been rejected by courts either wholly or in part.
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Comments
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josullivan58 Posted 6:21 pm
27 Oct 2008
On the Sierra Club Blog Carl Pope notes that the speed of the rule-making is effectively shutting out public comments and giving the basis for a legal challenge to void Bush's changes.
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Sean Casten Posted 12:23 am
28 Oct 2008
The crux of the issue is that in a permitting regime based on grandfathered permit rights - which the Clean Air Act most definitely is - you need some protection to make sure that you can't build an ever-bigger plant with a grandfathered permit. To take an obvious example, suppose you have a 500 MW coal plant that is permitted under 15-year old emissions limits. In the ensuring 15 years, emissions standards for new plants have fallen dramatically, giving you an economic advantage against newer, cleaner plants. The intent of NSR is to prevent that plant from building an adjacent 500 MW coal plant under the same permit, doubling plant output and gaming the regime. (I'm using an extreme case to illustrate, but the issue applies no less to a 10% power increase as a 100%.)
That seems sensible. The problem is that NSR has been written so broadly that it not only blocks new construction but also blocks efficiency enhancements. (After all, there's a big difference on the margin between boosting power output by burning more coal and boosting power output without burning any more coal.) But in the current framework, since both trigger new source review, both are discouraged, and so we have lots of existing generators that are actively discouraged from boosting plant efficiency.
That said, there is a clear political challenge here, as the existing generators would love to expand NSR overhaul well beyond efficiency considerations. That would be bad - but that doesn't mean that NSR overhaul isn't critically important.
In other words, while we ought to be careful with how NSR is overhauled, we shouldn't get caught up in knee-jerk opposition to critically needed reform.
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GreenMom Posted 10:03 am
28 Oct 2008
In 1996 a pretty good overhaul package was killed at the last minute -- Carol Browner was strong-armed into deep-sixing it after several years of effort on EPA's part to develop the rules.
And the sordid history under the Bush Administration is well-known -- routine maintenance rules that were huge loopholes and were eventually struck down in court, and more recently the changes mentioned above.
That said, if the next Administration could pull off a switch to output-based standards, rewarding efficiency (as you always point out), that would be huge, as would carbon cap-and-trade.
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