EPA Crackdown On Coal Power Plants Pending? Hardly.

[hatrack]

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The story goes like this: Greenwire reporter Darren Samuelsohn recently got ahold of an EPA document containing a list of 22 electric utilities that in the last five years have allegedly run afoul of NSR by making upgrades to their facilities without installing the required pollution controls. Greenwire published a story saying the utilities could face enforcement actions, and other news outlets followed suit.

According to Eric Schaeffer, a former top enforcement official at the EPA who left in protest over air-enforcement lapses under Bush, the publicity was not welcome news to EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt: "The word inside the agency is that Leavitt is apparently furious that this news is out. It's not likely that this indicates that the agency is doing some kind of election-year crackdown on utilities. In fact, it's a political embarrassment -- it just shows how the administration is holding up prosecutions recommended by its own staff."

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Bush's assistant administrator of air and radiation at EPA, Jeffrey Holmstead, made it his top priority to scrap the NSR rule at the behest of the electricity industry (which just happened to contribute $4.8 million to Bush, the Republican National Committee, and Bush's inaugural committee during the 2000 campaign, according to Public Citizen). So far Holmstead has been successful in his efforts to significantly loosen the way smokestack industries measure their baseline emissions under the rule. But his higher-priority initiative to exempt power plants from a provision requiring them to install state-of-the-art pollution controls in all expanded and upgraded facilities -- which the administration issued as a rule change in August 2003 -- was blocked by a D.C. circuit court in December after a group of state attorneys general asked for a stay. Despite this kink in his plans, Holmstead has not only allowed enforcement of the Clinton-era cases to lapse, he has filed only one new NSR case, against a utility in Kentucky -- one whose violations were so severe that it would have been culpable even under the relaxed rules that the administration is pushing for.

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Leavitt in the past has publicly promised that the EPA would move forward with any NSR cases that would bring about substantial pollution savings. But after news spread about the document last week, Leavitt's spokesperson, Cynthia Bergman, refused to address the matter with the press. "I won't comment on ongoing enforcement investigations," she told Muckraker. Leavitt's proactive message doesn't gel with insider accounts from EPA enforcement employees. "We've known about these cases for a while," Schaeffer told Muckraker. "A lot of them have been sitting for years because there's been a mandate from the White House to keep them from happening. Basically, Bush appointees have been trying to decide what kind of political consequences would occur if the cases were prosecuted."

EDIT

http://www.gristmagazine.com/muck/muck072004.asp?source=galert