The Bush administration plans to open a huge loophole in the United States’s air pollution laws, allowing an estimated 17 000 outdated power stations and factories to increase their carbon emissions with impunity.
Critics of draft regulations due to be unveiled by the US Environmental Protection Agency next week say they amount to a death knell for the Clean Air Act, the centrepiece of US environmental regulation.
The rules could represent the biggest defeat for US environmentalists since the Bush administration abandoned the Kyoto Treaty on global warming two years ago. But the energy industry welcomed them, saying they were essential for maintaining coal-fired power stations.
The regulations are being challenged by 13 states including New York. If adopted, they would represent a multimillion-dollar victory for energy corporations, most of which are significant contributors to the Republicans and which were consulted in the drafting of the administration’s energy plan by Vice-President Dick Cheney in 2001.
The US accounts for a quarter of the world’s carbon emissions, 10% more than all of Western Europe combined. Environmentalists fear that the US could undermine attempts to persuade other countries to stick to the targets laid out by Kyoto if it relaxes its controls even further.
Under the current rules set in 1977, industrial sites built before the Clean Air Act are exempt from its controls until they are upgraded in any way, beyond ”routine maintenance”, that increases emissions. At that point companies have to install filters and other controls or face penalties.
Under the draft rules corporations can do far more than ”routine maintenance” — investing in old plants up to 20% of its total value at a time — without having to spend money on anti-pollution equipment. The figure of 20% is highly controversial and in some places in the document has been replaced by an ”X”. Elsewhere the figure has been left apparently as an oversight.
The rules do not impose a time limit for the investment, allowing a company to make successive upgrades to an old power station, oil refinery or factory — even replacing it piece by piece and spending hundreds of millions of dollars — as long as each upgrade costs less than a fifth of the plant’s total value.
”The companies could completely rebuild their plants by gaming a gimmick that is designed to be gamed,” said John Walke of the Natural Resources Defence Council, a pressure group that leaked the draft.
”This is a massive giveaway,” he said. ”The Bush administration, using an arbitrary, Enron-like accounting gimmick, is authorising massive pollution increases to benefit Bush campaign contributors at the expense of public health.”
An agency spokesman said that the draft was being worked on and he could not comment on its contents.
Frank Maisano, spokesperson for the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, an industry group, said he was not familiar with the new rules.
”If it were to be set at 20%, that would be reasonable for a routine maintenance provision,” he said. ”The reality is you need to maintain your plants efficiently and reliably. The only thing the environmentalists here are interested in is getting rid of the coal plants.”
The change comes in the wake of victories for US Justice Department lawyers in cases against six big polluters in the electric power industry, forcing them to reduce emissions by more than 500 000 tonnes a year.
Analysts said that the six would have won their case under the new rules. The trade group representing the companies, Edison Electric Institute, contributed nearly $600 000 to the Republican Party from 1999 to 2002 and had at least 14 contacts with the Cheney energy task force in 2001.
The attorney general of New York, one state challenging the policy as being damaging to the health of residents, said he would mount a legal challenge as soon as the regulations were signed. — Â