WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a victory for energy producers, the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday proposed relaxing air pollution rules to make it easier for utilities to upgrade and expand their coal-burning power plants.
EPA's long-awaited announcement on the "New Source Review" requirements of the Clean Air Act touched one of the most contentious air pollution issues facing the Bush administration. It would ease some of the most stringent measures that environmental groups say are a key element in forcing dirty, older plants to cut emissions by up to 95 percent.
"EPA is taking actions now to improve NSR and thereby encourage emissions reductions," EPA Administrator Christie Whitman said in a statement. "NSR is a valuable program in many respects but the need for reform is clear and has broad-based support."
Whitman said her agency's review, urged more than a year ago by the White House energy tax force, "clearly established that some aspects of the NSR program have deterred companies from implementing projects that would increase energy efficiency and decrease air pollution."
White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Thursday the intent is to give industries greater flexibility as they perform repairs maintenance on plants and expand electricity production without having to install a whole range of other emissions controls.
The current regulation, he said, often discourages companies from investing in new pollution reduction projects and other new investment. He said the new approach will actually lead to less pollution, not more.
"Many of these people who are affected have chosen to leave in place old equipment, which pollutes more, rather than replace it and modernize it, which pollutes less," Fleischer said.
Environmentalists have maintained that the current regulations, pressed in lawsuits filed by the Clinton administration, ensure that utilities install additional pollution controls when they modernize or expand the plants to produce more electricity.
"With the release of this report, the administration dropped a dirty bomb and it's going to cost thousands of American lives," Buck Parker, executive director of Oakland, Calif.-based Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, said Thursday. "Utilities and refineries are going to have a very easy time of avoiding any type of New Source Review. It's a roadmap for how to avoid New Source Review."
The utility industry, buoyed when Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force began re-examining the air pollution regulations more than 15 months ago, long has argued that the regulations inhibit expansion of facilities.
"At the end of the day, power plant operators need to be able to run their facilities without the perpetual threat of litigation," said Dan Reidinger, a spokesman for Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for investor-owned utilities.
Changing the New Source Review requirements, environmentalists say, threatens to undermine lawsuits filed during the Clinton administration against a group of utilities and 51 power plants. The suits had alleged the plants were violating the Clean Air Act by making illegal modifications that produced more electricity and more pollution.
EPA and the Justice Department have threatened heavy fines on utilities unless they spend tens of billions of dollars to more strictly control emissions of acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide, smog-causing nitrogen oxides and mercury, a toxic chemical that contaminates waterways.
Environmentalists and state attorneys general from the Northeast have said they would challenge in court any substantial weakening of the program. An easing of the rules, they argued, will produce millions of tons of additional pollution from older coal-burning plants and amount to a rollback of the Clean Air Act. The Northeastern states say pollution from power plants in the Midwest drifts eastward.
While Cheney's task force urged that the overhaul be completed in 90 days, the issue became embroiled in lengthy internal debate over how far the agency should go in easing requirements for the utilities. Whitman said the administration wanted modest changes while the Energy Department and some White House presidential aides had argued for stronger action.
Administration officials said the EPA plans would include giving utilities the ability to expand production by raising the threshold that would trigger a requirement for new pollution controls. They said EPA also proposes to:
--Let utilities use pollution levels from any two consecutive years during the past 10 years to establish an emissions baseline that will determine how much additional pollution will be allowed before the controls kick in.
--Clarify the definition of "routine" repairs, rewriting a policy that has deterred companies from conducting needed repairs, which creates pollution problems at the plants.
