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Recently the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would relax the Clean Air Act's New Source Review requirements for power plants, factories and refineries to install state-of-the art pollution control equipment when they expand their capacity. These changes will allow the nation's oldest, dirtiest power plants, factories, and refineries to extend their working lives without having to meet the more stringent emissions standards imposed on newer, cleaner plants.
The new rules unfortunately are a mere warm- up to a much larger initiative, the Bush administration's ironically titled Clear Skies Act now pending in Congress. If enacted, Clear Skies will undermine 30 years of progress under the Clean Air Act, with poor people, the ill and people of color shouldering the bulk of the burden.
Most dramatically, Clear Skies would repeal New Source Review requirements entirely and substantially relax future caps on emissions of dangerous pollutants and the timeline for meeting those goals. This will further encourage the continued output of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which contribute to ozone and soot formation,and mercury.
Clear Skies would especially harm New York and other states in the Northeast that are downwind from old, coal-fired power plants in the Midwest. Vulnerable populations are at greatest risk of health effects. These include the poor, the elderly, children and people with respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, such as the 1.5 million New Yorkers affected by asthma, who are disproportionately people of color.
A more subtle, but equally troubling, consequence would be greater concentrations of dangerous pollutants near power plants, which are more likely to be located in or adjacent to lower-income communities and communities of color. Under the Acid Rain Program that was added to the Clean Air Act in 1990, power plants are allowed to buy and sell emissions "allowances" - essentially, rights to pollute-within a region, subject only to national emission caps. The Bush proposal would extend the emissions trading scheme in the Acid Rain Program for sulfur dioxide to include nitrogen oxides and mercury. Clear Skies would allow a power plant to emit as much of these substances as it wishes as long as credits from other plants are available for purchase.
To prevent the concentration of excessive emissions in local communities, the Acid Rain Program contains built-in "hotspots" safeguards. Yet Clear Skies egregiously omits such "hotspots" protection for communities located near power plants.
The net effect of such market-based programs is to transfer pollution from wealthier and healthier communities to poorer, sicker and more environmentally-vulnerable ones. The danger Clear Skies poses to lower-income communities can already be seen in the San Francisco Bay area. The Contra Costa Times recently concluded that approximately 87 percent of pollution credits generated by "cleaner" plants in the San Francisco Bay region were bought by refineries and power plants located in heavily industrialized and predominantly lower-income and minority neighborhoods of the bay area's Contra Costa County. This tendency for pollution "allowances" to gravitate to the dirtiest power plants undermines the goals of environmental justice and bodes poorly for the economically depressed cities that are home to New York's dirtiest power plants.
We should take a lesson from New Jersey, which recently announced an end to its "Open Market Emissions Trading" program, recognizing that all it had done was shift smog-forming emissions from one source to another.
Although it represents a gift for Bush's powerful friends in the energy industry, the Clear Skies Act only promises more pollution for poor communities and dirtier skies over New York. The rest of us deserve better, and our congressional delegation should take the lead in saying so.
©The Daily News, 2003
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