Source:
http://www.oneworld.net/article/view/72326/1/
WASHINGTON, DC, November 6, 2003 (ENS) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has decided not to pursue pending enforcement actions against 70 power plants, refineries and other industrial facilities that received a Notice of Violation under the New Source Review rules of the Clean Air Act. It means the agency may abandon enforcement even against companies that have already been found in violation of the law, and drop cases that are ongoing in federal court.
The assistant administrator for EPA's enforcement office, John Peter Suarez, told EPA enforcement staff and attorneys of the administration's decision Tuesday. The announcement has drawn objections from the state of New York and a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But the electricity industry says the New Source Review threatens the reliability of the national electrical system without helping the environment.
The New Source Review program, established in 1977, requires owners of industrial facilities to install the best pollution control equipment available when they make a major modification to an existing facility that increases emissions. But the Bush administration has been relaxing the New Source Review rules, a policy favored by the electric power industry. The administration has published rule changes to the program, due to take effect on December 27, that exempts modifications that cost less than a certain percentage of the entire facility or a specific piece of equipment, as much as 20 percent for some industries, even if they produce more emissions. A dozen states, the District of Columbia and several local governments filed suit in federal court late last month to block the rule changes.
Today, U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who serves as the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sought a hearing by the panel on the Bush administration's order to stop any pending enforcement investigations against electric utilities and other industries that received a Notice of Violation. The senator wants the Judiciary Committee to determine the impact the Administration's decisions will have on the cases already referred to the Department of Justice by the EPA and on cases that are currently before federal courts.
His request, to Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, also asks that the Justice Department report to the committee how much funding is needed to pursue the cases. Leahy said the pending cases could reduce the emission of hundreds of thousands of tons of pollutants into the air each year. "The White House's policy is to coddle the big polluters, and the public be damned," added Leahy. "Doling out pollution pardons may make some big political contributors happy, but the American people will pay the price by breathing dirtier air."
At a July 2002 joint hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Environment and Public Works Committee, Jeffrey Holmstead, assistant administrator of EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, responded to a direct question from Leahy by testifying that the New Source Review changes would not impact the EPA enforcement cases. Since that testimony, the EPA has insisted that New Source Review rule changes would not diminish existing enforcement actions or affect the investigation of past violations. The EPA decision not to move forward with enforcement of the New Source Review could throw that enforcement to the states. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer today called on the EPA to provide its enforcement files to state officials for review and possible legal action.
In a letter to EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt, who was sworn in today, Spitzer asked the new EPA head to "intervene" and send the files to the offices of state attorneys general. "You have said that balance and stewardship will be at the heart of your environmental policy," Spitzer wrote. "There is nothing balanced about a unilateral decision not to enforce the Clean Air Act. An enforcement program that allows additional air pollution to destroy the Adirondack lakes and aggravate urban smog is not stewardship."
In 1999, under the Clinton administration, Spitzer's office formed a partnership with the federal government to reduce air pollution from power plants. "We filed a series of lawsuits, the foundation of which was the New Source Review provision of the Clean Air Act," he said today. "That effort is now at risk because of the EPA’s decision, revealed yesterday, to abandon a series of important Clean Air Act cases."
"This action means that the states must again fill a void left by the failure of the Bush administration to enforce the law. We are prepared to do so in New York," said Spitzer, who serves in the Republican administration of Governor George Pataki. The EPA has referred 13 cases to the U.S. Department of Justice for violations of the New Source Review program. None of these cases has been acted upon by Bush administration.
The EPA has also filed Notices of Violation against 47 facilities - six power plants, 15 refineries, and 26 other industrial facilities. The agency has conducted investigations into another 69 power plants and seven other industrial facilities for suspected violations of the Clean Air Act. The attorney general is asking the EPA to provide all of these files to the attorney general of the state in which the polluters are located, and also to the attorneys general of the states downwind that are harmed by this pollution. If provided appropriate information by the EPA, the states may decide to complete these investigations and take legal action, Spitzer said." A federal-state partnership is the best way to enforce air quality laws. But if the federal government refuses to act to protect citizens, the states must be provided with appropriate information so that they can step forward to do so."
The Electric Reliability Coordinating Council supports the Bush administration's decision to relax the New Source Review rules. This coalition of electric utilities, labor unions, consumers, public power companies and businesses says the EPA's enforcement of New Source Review rules is "threatening the reliability of our national electrical system and unnecessarily increasing the cost of power to American consumers and businesses, while providing no additional protection to the environment." The council says that New Source Review enforcement blocks "routine maintenance, repair and efficiency improvement projects that could immediately expand generating capability without increasing fuel burning and will decrease by a significant percentage the total available installed capacity through caps on operations."
But in the U.S. Senate, Leahy of Vermont, one of the states that is suing the Bush administration to block relaxation of New Source Review rules, does not buy that position. "We now have smoking guns about their policy on behalf of these belching smokestacks," Leahy said. "The administration has been telling Congress one thing and doing exactly the opposite. It's past time for some accountability. Someone needs to come to the Senate and explain what is going to happen to the cases their policy is leaving in the lurch."
Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2003. All Rights Reserved.
Source:
http://www.gristmagazine.com/muck/mu...?source=weekly
They Blinded Me with Pseudo Science
The Bush administration is jettisoning real scientists in favor of yes-men
by Amanda Griscom
In the final days of October, Craig Manson, assistant Interior secretary for fish and wildlife and parks, dealt a "Godfather"-style blow to a team of government biologists that was about to release a final report with flow recommendations for the Missouri River -- a blow that could have a sizable ripple effect on the river itself. The report was to have argued for the need to better mimic the natural flow of the Missouri (releasing more water from hydroelectric dams in the spring and less in the summer) to prevent extinction of the river's endangered sturgeon, tern, and plover populations, and to reduce the risk of future flooding.
Responding to objections from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that the report's suggestions would economically inconvenience dam owners and the Missouri River's barge industry, Manson penned a three-paragraph memo ordering a second opinion on Missouri River management. This opinion is to be provided by a "special national team of [U.S. Fish and Wildlife] Service experts ... referred to as 'the Wise Guys' or the 'SWAT Team,' [which] has served well in other complex, high-interest consultations,'" he wrote, with nary a trace of irony to soften the mafia-boss language. The replacement biological SWAT team will reach its conclusions after a 45-day study; the original team's findings were based on more than 10 years of research and were confirmed by independent peer review as well as by the National Academy of Sciences.
Those original findings were also upheld last year by a federal court: When the Corps refused to adopt the flow-change recommendations made by the team in 2000, the environmental group American Rivers took the agency to court and won. Still, the Corps has only partially complied, and is now arguing that river conditions have changed since 2000 and that the science is unreliable: "Our [most recent] engineering studies have demonstrated that the proposed flow changes will not achieve desired biological attributes," said Paul Johnston, a spokesperson for the Corps.
Johnston argued that mating habitat for river life should be created by bulldozers, not river flows: "We can build sandbars mechanically for mating habitat that tremendous flows [as well as commercial cost] would be required to accomplish naturally." Johnston estimated that the commercial cost of implementing the scientists' recommendations would be $30 million in lost annual hydroelectric plant revenue; in addition, the barge industry would face losses resulting from shutting down operations for up to two months of the year.
But the ecological costs of not adopting the recommendations are potentially far more calamitous. "Keep in mind that these are engineers talking about biology," said Allyn Sapa, a recently retired biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who supervised the Missouri River project for more than five years. "They don't seem to understand that right now we are pushing three species toward the brink of extinction and the current water-flow operations are violating the Endangered Species Act. It seems that the [engineers and the Bush administration] don't want to hear that. And it's hard not to think that because our findings don't match up with what they want to hear, they are putting a new team on the job who will give them what they want."
A scientist on the disbanded team who is still employed at Fish and Wildlife spoke to Muckraker on condition of anonymity: "What concerns me is not just that the officials seem to be looking for a predetermined answer [on how to manage river flow], but that the replacement 'SWAT team' scientists know almost nothing about the Missouri River -- whereas our team has worked in this river basin for years."
Equally calamitous could be the long-term political costs of jettisoning sound science to curry favor with industry, said Eric Eckl, director of media affairs for American Rivers. "This is just the latest chapter in a politically complicated book called 'War and Peace over the Missouri River.'" The central villain in this novel, said Eckl, is Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), a strong supporter of the barge industry who seems convinced that any kind of environmental protections for the river will sabotage his state's economy. His paranoia has been swallowed whole by the Bush administration: In August, President Bush attended a fundraiser for Bond and declared that no federal agency should govern the flow of the longest river in America.
There are reasons why Bush may find Bond so convincing: While Missouri is hardly the only state with a claim on the eponymous river, which runs from Montana to the Mississippi River, it is a swing state with more electoral votes than any other in the river's path. And Bush doesn't need to worry about those other states from a campaign standpoint, as most are solidly Republican.
From a legal and scientific standpoint, however, he might well have to worry. The fish and wildlife agencies of all seven states along the river have written in support of the original team's findings. American Rivers said that if the new team reaches pro-industry conclusions, it's more than prepared to go back to court. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) has also publicly questioned the administration's move and is teaming up with other river-basin senators to call for an investigation into the Bush administration's decision to sack the scientists. "For over 10 years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been saying that the science is on our side, but now the Bush administration seems to want different scientists to reach different conclusions," Daschle said in a statement. As we've seen before, this administration's M.O. is simple: If you don't like the science, change the scientist.
Slippery When Wetland
That same motto could have been scrawled atop a resignation notice submitted in late October by Bruce Boler, a former U.S. EPA scientist in Florida who quit in protest when the agency accepted a study concluding that wetlands can produce more pollution than they filter. "It's a blatant reversal of traditional scientific findings that wetlands naturally purify water," Boler told Muckraker. "Wetlands are often referred to as nature's kidneys. Most self-respecting scientists will tell you that, and yet [private] developers and officials [at the Corps] wanted me to support their position that wetlands are, literally, a pollution source."
Why? So that Florida developers could fill in the wetlands to make golf courses (which use enough fertilizer and pesticides to make them among the highest-polluting forms of development). Boler's scientific judgment that wetlands were not pollution sources but pollution filters -- a judgment based on 25 years of research -- would not have stopped big-budget golf courses and other projects from going forward, but it would have forced developers to clean up all pollution runoff generated by their projects. By contrast, a finding that wetlands are actually pollution sources would decrease the cleanup burden (and the price tag) for developers.
"Developers were really upset with my findings and protested vehemently to the state and the [Corps], saying that we did not have the authority to raise these objections to their proposed high-dollar developments, some of which spanned nearly 2,000 acres and included many million-dollar homes," Boler said.
The Corps was upset with Boler's science, too -- so much so that John Hall, chief of its regulatory division in Jacksonville (which is responsible for issuing developer permits), "began referring to me as a 'loose cannon,' and during one meeting slammed down a two-foot-long cannon replica on the conference table to dramatize [this nickname] for me," Boler said.
Not surprisingly, a developer put a different scientist on the job to come up with an alternative finding that traces nitrogen and phosphate to wetlands themselves -- a conclusion that the EPA eventually accepted. It's true that isolated wetlands do emit trace amounts of nitrogen and phosphate due to the natural decomposition of plant material in their runoff, but according to Boler, it's absurd to think that these natural toxins compare even remotely in either quantity or toxicity to the nitrogen and phosphate that come from artificial developments. But the replacement scientist found a way to prove just that: "The conclusions [developed by the new scientist] were skewed because he got his data from water-quality samples that were collected in wetlands or ponds next to roads and bridges where surrounding developments discharge pollutants," Boler said.
According to Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the rate of replacing scientists in government agencies has been unusually high during the Bush administration. "There is always one major development or another that can't go forward without scientific evaluation," said Ruch, "and increasingly the scientific expert on which those developments hinge is twisting in the wind. If the scientist gives the inconvenient answer they commit career suicide, and if they give the convenient answer they get promoted."
Boler clearly didn't get promoted, but he did land another job at the Interior Department, working at Everglades National Park. In a strange twist, the man who ultimately oversees the National Park System is one Craig Manson. When Muckraker spoke with Boler, he hadn't heard about the fate of the Missouri scientists, but Ruch had: "He may be jumping from the frying pan into the fire."
Gag Me With a Memo
Last month, Muckraker correctly predicted that the U.S. EPA would eventually drop the backlog of cases against power plants that had violated the New Source Review rules of the Clean Air Act (which the Bush administration gutted earlier this year), thereby allowing the utility industry to avoid an estimated $10 billion to $20 billion of investments in new pollution-filtration technologies. What we didn't predict was that the EPA would try to muzzle its employees shortly before announcing that it would drop the investigations. The agency barred employees from talking not just to the media and the public, but also to congressional staff members and state and local government officials about the status of enforcement investigations or information related to enforcement actions.
The gag order was issued in an Oct. 28 memo signed by Assistant EPA Administrator John Peter Suarez and leaked to the staff of the Clean Air Trust. The four-page memo pays lip service to the need to "continue to work openly, fairly, and in accordance with all legal requirements," but its real message lies in the list of those to whom EPA employees shouldn't speak, another list of topics they shouldn't touch, and an exhortation to protect "sensitive and confidential information."
"This memo starkly demonstrates that those government officials evoking the courage to make the administration's anti-clean air policies public are operating in an extraordinarily difficult, if not hostile, working environment," said Frank O'Donnell, director of the trust.
Worse, that memo could make it difficult for states to prosecute these investigations in the EPA's stead, said O'Donnell, as it blatantly prohibits staff from talking to representatives of state or local governments that don't enter into a joint prosecution agreement with the feds. The memo, however, does not seem to be intimidating the attorneys general of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, who say they are more than ready to take matters into their own hands and pick up the dropped cases against the polluting plants.
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