EPA Delays Proposals On Coal-Fired Plants
Environmentalists Denounce Move

By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 15, 2001; Page A17

The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday delayed announcing its proposals for aging coal-fired power plants and said the plan will be part of a more comprehensive set of policy options scheduled for release in September.

Environmentalists immediately denounced the EPA move as an attempt to dilute, in a flurry of other news in September, a utility pollution decision that the activists predict will be unpopular with the public.

This week, the EPA had been scheduled to release the results of an in-depth reconsideration of a policy called New Source Review, under which the Clinton-era Justice Department sued dozens of older power plants, alleging they violated the Clean Air Act by modernizing their facilities without adding anti-pollution machinery to combat emissions. Activists say the plants' emissions shorten the lives of thousands of people yearly.

Yesterday, the EPA announced it will instead release its findings on New Source Review next month as part of a package of legislative recommendations on an array of air pollution issues. EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman repeated yesterday the broad outline of a plan to limit power plant emissions of three air pollutants -- nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury.

The upcoming proposal, she said in a statement, "will reduce air pollution from power plants significantly more than the existing system."

Environmentalists are worried that the Bush administration will reverse the Clinton administration's tough enforcement decisions on New Source Review, partly in response to aggressive lobbying by midwestern and southern utility companies.

"The Bush administration knows it will face a firestorm of criticism when it releases its conclusions on New Source Review, so they're trying to bury it" in September, said John Walke, director of the clean air program for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

A senior EPA official said that the administration has not reached a decision on New Source Review and that, in any case, the new legislative proposal to be released in September "is a better vehicle than NSR" for reducing power plant pollution.

But Armond Cohen, executive director of the Clean Air Task Force, an activist group, said Whitman will take the nation on "a very risky course" if she ends the crackdown on old power plants in favor of proposals on the three pollutants that may never pass Congress.

"It's a posture of 'trust us,' " Cohen said. "We're being asked to give up current public health protections in return for unproven future protections that Congress might not enact." Moreover, he said, by proposing regulation of the three pollutants, Whitman is avoiding a crackdown on carbon dioxide, a major pollutant in coal-fired power plants that President Bush said during the presidential campaign he would regulate.

"We've learned to view the Bush team's promises on future air pollution regulations with a certain skepticism," Cohen said.