And a Power Plant in Every Home

The Bush administration continues to strip away regulations on their way out the door. This time, the department is the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Clean Air Act is the target. McClatchy [1] reports (emphasis added):

At the Bush administration's direction, the Environmental Protection Agency is working on a new rule that would weaken pollution regulations for power plants, allowing them to increase emissions without adding controls.

EPA officials have been working on a fast track to meet a Saturday deadline, but many of them are arguing against changing the rule, said former EPA attorney John Walke and an EPA career official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the official wasn't authorized to make statements.

They said that the EPA was expected to decide in November on another eleventh-hour rule that would allow more power plants to be built near national parks and wilderness areas.

Power companies have sought the rule about power plant emissions for many years, and it was part of Vice President Dick Cheney's 2001 energy plan. Rules finalized more than 60 days before the administration leaves office are harder for the next administration to undo.

The Clean Air Act requires older plants that have their lives extended with new equipment to install pollution-control technology if their emissions increase. The rule change would allow plants to measure emissions on an hourly basis, rather than their total yearly output. This way, plants could run for more hours and increase overall emissions without exceeding the threshold that would require additional pollution controls.

As usual, informing the public and soliciting their opinion did not factor into this decision:

The EPA official said that concerns in the agency were that the analysis justifying the rule change was weak and the administration didn't plan to make the analysis public for a comment period, as is customary...

The EPA is under no obligation to reveal internal deliberations, so in many cases the public never knows what objections may have been raised.

The White House wouldn't comment on its views about changing the rule, Kristen Hellmer, a spokeswoman for the White House's Council on Environmental Quality, said Monday.

The Washington Post Editorial Board [2] weighs in, concluding:

Instituting this rule would be willful disregard of science, the intent of the Clean Air Act and the public's right to have a voice in such an important decision. And it would cement the Bush administration's say-one-thing-and-do-another reputation on climate change. The planet is warming faster than scientists had predicted. What the EPA might do would make it worse.

Oh, and in a last minute move, the EPA also lowered the restrictions on airborne lead [3] after the White House objected. The next administration will have a large number of messes to clean up.