Posted on 08/07/2002 3:19:43 AM PDT by snopercod
Edited on 04/13/2004 3:29:41 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
A Bay Area clean air program that allows companies to buy and sell the right to pollute has fostered a shift in industrial air pollution to Contra Costa County, a Times investigation has found.
While the plan has reduced emissions from refineries, power plants and factories across the Bay Area's nine counties, 87 percent of pollution credits earned as part of the plan have been used in a single county, Contra Costa.
(Excerpt) Read more at bayarea.com ...
After almost one year, the press has started looking at the effects of the draconian cuts in bay-area emission standards that went into effect on January 1 this year.
I had predicted that the Los Medanos Energy Center [LMEC, at Pittsburg] would have to shut down, since there was no possible (technical) way for those large plants to meet the new regulations.
I should have known that the new regulations were just a stealth tax on LMEC and the ratepayers, and that the "pollution" would continue.
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I have real mixed feelings about these kinds of banking of anything. I have even stronger feelings about state mandated regulation programs that start, and then folks change the rules after many changes have been meet.
First, the Air Pollution rules are based on "basin wide" impacts with some theoretical modeling for worst case types of locations. Most of the modeling I have seen is guessing at best, with a high degree of conservative assumptions thrown in so that "things should be OK, most of the time." That approach is fine, as long as pollution levels are well below basin "health limits." As the pollution level within the Basin approaches the Clearn Air Act/EPA defined health limits, then the homogenious nature of the air pollution within the basin starts to become an issue in people's minds.
The difficult issue that society has not really addressed is that we want our industry far away from our population centers, but we want our jobs close to where we live and don't want to have people driving a long distance to their jobs. We can't have it both ways, but the "green" environmental social planners want it both ways.
I find it facinating that government tax incentives to direct corporate activity, government air pollution credit trading and banking to direct corporate activity, government electricity and natural gas deregulation to direct "proper" corporate energy activity, are games that government sets up and then changes the rules fairly often so that the players are never really sure how the game is played and what activities are or are not desired.
Ah yes......California politicians!
Finally, I attended about two years ago a series of Air Pollution seminars jointly sponsored by EPA and some environmental groups. A big topic was "Environmental Justice." Boy did my skin crawl when that topic was explained. I can understand the need to not encourage industry to go into an area of poor people and pollute their environment. But from my college geography class days, what happens is just the opposite. It is the industrial areas that are the "low rent" areas and this helps low income workers get and keep industrial jobs. If we start forcing industry out to the middle of nowhere (as long as it isn't a wilderness, park or other Class I air shedd) then the industrial workers will need to live far away. That will mean large commuting costs or transit costs.
...more motor vehicle pollution, and more highway deaths.
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