Clear Skies Act

Today the NY Times carries an editorial celebrating that “President Bush’s Clear Skies initiative appears dead for this session of Congress.” The “Clear Skies Act” is a proposed amendment to the Clean Air Act wich sets new targets for emissions of sulfur dioxide, mercury, and nitrogen oxides from U.S. power plants. The EPA has a portion of its website here devoted to the Clear Skies Act where it notes the legislation aims to achieve a 70 percent reduction of nitrogen oxides and of sulfur dioxide. This is a noble goal, in spite of it not affecting carbon dioxide. Here are specific statistics on probable reductions from the Department of State.
But the NY Times, along with two prominent Republican governors – George Pataki of New York and Arnold Schwarzenegger of California – oppose the bill. Current law is a complex set of rules that requires a case-by-case drawing up of plans for states, localities and even individual power plants. Governors like this flexibility, but often fail to consider the law suits accompanying regulation, meaning it can take up to a decade to complete a Clean Air Act rulemaking. Bush’s proposal would cut down on the suits by setting an overall reduction for the power industry nationwide, and then leaves it up to companies to decide for themselves how to meet the mandates, including by trading permits to one another. But it’s likely that companies in states such as New York and California will seek to purchase more permits, and may lead to more relative pollution there, even though nationwide pollution would be drastically reduced.
Individual environmental groups have lined up to oppose the bill. The National Resource Defense Council argues that the new targets are actually weaker than previous ones. “Compared to current law, the Clear Skies plan would allow three times more toxic mercury emissions, 50 percent more sulfur emissions, and hundreds of thousands more tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides.” The NRDC offers no source for its claim, however, and seems to be deceptively referring to the time between now and the legislation’s implementation.
The Sierra Club offers a bit more specifics in its criticisms. But they seem to amount to nothing more than saying the Clean Air Act currently allows the government to restrict pollution more if it chose to, and that the new legislation (Clear Skies Act) actually mandates less pollution, but less than what the government could do already under existing laws. Moreover, it too deceptively refers to the time between now and the legislation’s implementation.
In the end, these groups and the Times oppose a good bill on the shaky grounds that it doesn’t go far enough. The plan permanently caps plant emissions nationwide, meaning that pollutant levels must not rise no matter how much more power is generated in the future. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, the two power-plant emissions of most concern to public health, would be nearly eliminated as compared with levels in 1970. It’s time to move forward with cleaning up our air.