Cleaning the Air
|
Recent News:
|
We Vermonters treasure the physical attributes of our beautiful state, and we
rely on the land, rivers, and lakes to sustain our lives, agricultural
industry, and tourism. Maintaining a healthy environment is essential to us,
and yet some of the biggest threats to Vermont's environment are not under our
control. Toxic pollution from coal-fired power plants in other parts of the
country blows into Vermont and deposits in our lakes, rivers and forests. This
pollution contaminates our fish, contributes to summertime ozone haze that makes
it hard for some to breathe and drastically reduces visibility
One of my biggest responsibilities as your Senator is to do everything I can
to protect the health and vitality of Vermont's environment, and clean air is
an essential part of this effort. Since I arrived in the Senate, I have played
an active role in developing national environmental and agricultural
legislation, always with an eye to how these laws will work to protect Vermont
both environmentally and economically. In particular, I am working with my
colleagues to promote clean air legislation, including cosponsoring Senator
Jeffords' Clean Power Act
(S. 556).
I have also introduced my own legislation, and I will continue to push ahead
with these efforts to reduce air pollution.
Continued Efforts to Clean Our Air
In my continuing efforts to protect Vermonters and millions of others across the
Nation from the impact of air pollution, I recently cosponsored an oversight hearing in
February 2004 to seek answers about the Bush Administration’s lack of
enforcement of the Clean Air Act (CAA) (DPC
Oversight Hearing). This hearing was a follow-up to a joint
hearing of the Judiciary and Environment Committees that Senator Jeffords and I
held a year and a half ago in order to get the Administration to answer some
very basic questions about how their changes to the CAA would affect public
health, the status of current clean air lawsuits, and regulatory enforcement. With the assistance of my
fellow Senators, I assembled a nonpartisan panel of leading experts from state
and local air pollution agencies and two former senior Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) officials, to provide testimony on the Bush Administration’s
revisions to the CAA New Source Review (NSR) provisions. All of these experts
clearly stated that the actions of the Bush Administration have weakened the NSR
provisions, have undercut air pollution enforcement
efforts at EPA (Former
EPA Officials Testimony),
and that previous statements by top level Administration officials
misrepresented the impact that the Bush NSR revisions would have on ongoing law suits
(Clean
Air Enforcement Cases).
History of the New Source Review
The NSR provisions were adopted as part of the 1977
CAA amendments, and later modified in the 1990 CAA
amendments [link to timeline]. A key provision of the NSR is that it
requires companies to upgrade their old air polluting coal-fired power plants
with state-of-the art pollution control technology whenever they undergo
a major modification, but exempts routine maintenance activities from
this requirement. Unfortunately, many companies redefined the term
major modification to mean routine maintenance. Thus, for nearly
the last 30 years they have used this loophole to refurbish old
polluting plants without having to install new technology that would
make the air we all breath cleaner and safer. Through cooperative efforts made
over the last ten years with states and industry, EPA was finally about
to close this loophole until the Bush Administration came along and
created a whole new set of loops holes.
The New Bush Loopholes in the New Source Review
The Bush Administration began its assault on the
NSR program in 2001. This assault resulted in supposed “reforms” to the
NSR that instead created new loopholes for industry to exploit and
continue their practice of making major modifications to power plants
while being exempt from cleaning up their air pollution. The revised
NSR contains a new loophole called the “equipment replacement rule”,
which will allow companies to make an unlimited number of modifications
to a power plant so long as the cost of each modification is less than 20 percent of the cost
of a whole new unit. Because all individual components of a plant cost less
than 20 percent of the cost of a whole new unit, this loophole would
allow any plant to be rebuilt piece-by-piece indefinitely in its current
air polluting form. The effect of the 20 percent loophole can be
seen at Illinois Power's Baldwin Plant, where all of the plant
modifications in the last 20 years would be considered "routine" and not
subject to upgrade requirements that would reduce air pollution (Chart).
This is
bad policy for all Vermonters and has been done at the expense of
millions of Americans who are at greater risk from higher levels of
exposure to smog and toxic pollutants like mercury.
Summary
