Bipartisan Bill Allows States To Reject Clean Air Rollbacks

(17 September 2003 — Boulder)  Today Environmental Defense praised bipartisan legislation introduced by Congressman Mark Udall (D-CO) and Christopher Shays (R-CT) giving states the right to choose whether to adopt the Bush administration’s recently finalized exemptions to the Clean Air Act’s “new source review” program.  The exemptions, which would weaken long-standing clean air safeguards, have come under widespread criticism by states, public health organizations and environmental groups.  In the final rules, the administration has also departed from Clean Air Act law and practice by mandating that state and local governments implement the rollbacks.  The bill introduced today would restore state’s right to choose whether to implement the exemptions.   

“The bipartisan bill introduced today by Congressmen Udall and Shays would allow states to decide whether it’s in their best interests to carry out the sweeping changes the Bush administration has made to the health protections of the Clean Air Act,” said Environmental Defense senior attorney Vickie Patton.  “This bill’s flexibility is good news for the states and good news for public health and environmental protections.” 

The rules in question were adopted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on August 27, 2003 and provide that changes at industrial facilities involving millions of dollars in equipment replacement and leading to substantially higher levels of air pollution are no longer required to adopt improved air pollution control technology.  The facilities affected include thousands of power plants, refineries, pulp and paper mills, chemical plants, and other industrial facilities throughout the United States.

The EPA’s controversial rules were issued after an August 2003 General Accounting Office report found that EPA relied on anecdotal information provided by major air polluters to justify its rollbacks to the Clean Air Act’s new source review.  The original “new source review” program adopted in the 1977 Clean Air Act amendments required old, high-polluting sources such as power plants to prevent pollution increases that would worsen unhealthy air quality in urban centers or adversely impact national parks.  The new rules would broadly exclude existing industrial sources from the long-standing requirement to modernize pollution controls by imposing an arbitrary economic test that would exempt major pollution-increasing activity from clean air protections while ignoring public health considerations.