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The Plain Dealer
www.cleveland.com/plaindealer/
Cleaning up the Clean Air Act
Editorials
August 12, 2001
Utility companies love the U.S. Environ mental Protection
Agency's suggestion that it might eliminate several air
pollution regulations and replace them with a pollution
credits program.
Environmental groups detest it, fearing that rich power
companies would just buy their way out of the Clean Air
Act.
But U.S. EPA Commissioner Christine Todd Whitman's broad
plan to reduce three major pollutants - nitrogen oxide,
sulfur dioxide and mercury - by credit-trading is a good
idea: There must be a simpler way to clean up power plants
without the bickering, delays and lawsuits employed by all
sides.
Meanwhile, it wouldn't hurt if the administration found
some way to decrease carbon dioxide emissions, which some
scientists believe contributed to global warming.
A cap-and-trade program may be the answer to all of this.
But it should include some kind of mechanism to make sure
that people living downwind of polluting plants don't suffer.
That means Whitman should maintain the "new source
review" regulation, which requires the installation
of advanced pollution controls when power plants are expanded
or modified.
New source review helps decrease pollution nationally and
in the plants' own back yards, often close to cities and
suburbs.
Utility companies oppose the requirement because they say
it can be costly, arbitrary (energy companies and the EPA
have been fighting in court over the definition of maintenance
and expansion) and in some cases, nearly impossible to meet.
Ralph DiNicola, a spokesman for FirstEnergy Corp., points
to one of its coal-burning plants near Steubenville that
has no place for a gigantic scrubber and other pollution
controls.
But he also acknowledged that it is the only one of FirstEnergy's
16 plants that would struggle to meet new source review
standards. Exemptions can be made for the relatively few
such plants.
As a rule, plants undergoing expansion, which should be
clearly defined, should get new scrubbers and other pollution
controls, not just a paint job and a little tinkering under
the hood.
The Clean Air Act should be tweaked in both directions, giving
the energy industry the certainty and consistency that it
craves and assuring citizens that streamlining the act doesn't
mean strangling it.
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