Posted on 04/07/2004 3:23:20 AM PDT by The Raven
President Bush doesn't talk about new-source review very often. In fact, he has mentioned it in a speech to the public only once, in remarks he delivered on Sept. 15, 2003, to a cheering crowd of power-plant workers and executives in Monroe, Mich., about 35 miles south of Detroit. It was an ideal audience for his chosen subject. New-source review, or N.S.R., involves an obscure and complex set of environmental rules and regulations that most Americans have never heard of, but to people who work in the power industry, few subjects are more crucial.
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The Monroe plant, which is operated by Detroit Edison, is one of the nation's top polluters. Its coal-fired generators emit more mercury, a toxic chemical, than any other power plant in the state. Until recently, power plants like the one in Monroe were governed by N.S.R. regulations, which required the plant's owners to install new pollution-control devices if they made any significant improvements to the plant. Those regulations now exist in name only; they were effectively eliminated by a series of rule changes that the Bush administration made out of the public eye in 2002 and 2003. What the president was celebrating in Monroe was the effective end of new-source review.
''The old regulations,'' he said, speaking in front of a huge American flag, ''undermined our goals for protecting the environment and growing the economy.'' New-source review just didn't work, he said. It dissuaded power companies from updating old equipment. It kept power plants from operating at full efficiency. ''Now we've issued new rules that will allow utility companies, like this one right here, to make routine repairs and upgrades without enormous costs and endless disputes,'' the president said. ''We simplified the rules. We made them easy to understand. We trust the people in this plant to make the right decisions.'' The audience applauded.
Of the many environmental changes brought about by the Bush White House, none illustrate the administration's modus operandi better than the overhaul of new-source review. The president has had little success in the past three years at getting his environmental agenda through Congress. His energy bill remains unpassed. His Clear Skies package of clean-air laws is collecting dust on a committee shelf. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge remains closed to oil and gas exploration.
But while its legislative initiatives have languished on Capitol Hill, the administration has managed to effect a radical transformation of the nation's environmental laws, quietly and subtly, by means of regulatory changes and bureaucratic directives. Overturning new-source review -- the phrase itself embodies the kind of dull, eye-glazing bureaucrat-speak that distracts attention -- represents the most sweeping change, and among the least noticed.
The changes to new-source review have been portrayed by the president and his advisers as a compromise between the twin goals of preserving the environment and enabling business, based on a desire to make environmental regulations more streamlined and effective. But a careful examination of the process that led to the new policy reveals a very different story, and a different motivation. I conducted months of extensive interviews with those involved in the process, including current and former government officials, industry representatives, public health researchers and environmental advocates. (Top environmental officials in the Bush administration declined to comment for this article.) Through those interviews and the review of hundreds of pages of documents and transcripts, one thing has become clear: the administration's real problem with the new-source review program wasn't that it didn't work. The problem was that it was about to work all too well -- in the way, finally, that it was designed to when it was passed by Congress more than 25 years ago.
Having long flouted the new-source review law, many of the nation's biggest power companies were facing, in the last months of the 1990's, an expensive day of reckoning. E.P.A. investigators had caught them breaking the law. To make amends, the power companies were on the verge of signing agreements to clean up their plants, which would have delivered one of the greatest advances in clean air in the nation's history. Then George W. Bush took office, and everything changed.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Some power plants could "overscrub" or remove more than they had to and sell their "allowances to emit" to another utility in this trading program.
Right after passage of the bill - I asked an EPA manager "What happens to new plants?" "Is there still a separate law for new plants?"
He said: "You don't need it."
Meaning ?? He was referring to the national cap on emissions.....A hundred new plants could be built as long as the nation stayed under the yearly emissions cap.
At least - that's what he thought the intent of Congress was at the time.
I asked
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