44 senators ask EPA not to change clean air rules

ERIN KELLY; Gannett News Service
August 01, 2002, Thursday

WASHINGTON -- Forty-four senators pressed the Bush administration Thursday to reconsider a proposed change in clean air regulations that they say threatens public health and the environment.

"We have serious concerns that the changes could allow more air pollution -- causing more asthma, more heart and lung problems, and more premature deaths," the senators wrote in a letter to Christine Todd Whitman, who heads the Environmental Protection Agency.

Senators urged the administration to complete an analysis of the health effects of its proposed rewrite of a clean air regulation known as New Source Review before changing the rule. A top EPA official told two Senate panels last month that he could not specify when or how much air quality would improve if the regulation were changed. The regulation requires aging power plants, oil refineries and chemical factories to reduce their pollution whenever they expand or upgrade their facilities. However, the environmental agency has proposed changes that would allow plants to get bigger without automatically having to get cleaner.

"We think that creates a danger to the health of American families," said Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C.

Forty Democrats; three New England Republicans; and independent Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont, who chairs the Senate's environment committee, signed the letter. EPA officials had no immediate response.

If the administration ignores the senators, the lawmakers will try to attach legislation to a spending bill this fall to stop the EPA from implementing the changes, Edwards said at a Capitol news conference with Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.

"Hopefully, it won't come to that," Edwards said. "But if it does, we'll do whatever it takes."

A spokesman for the utility industry -- which lobbied the White House to change regulations, said the senators were merely playing election-year politics.

"Their statements are more about political science than environmental science," said Scott Segal, spokesman for the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council.

Current regulations actually contribute to air pollution by discouraging plants from modernizing and installing cleaner, more efficient equipment, Segal said.

Edwards and Lieberman said the existing regulation isn't perfect, and they would support changes to reduce red tape in enforcing the law. But they said the administration plan would allow polluters to increase toxic emissions by permitting them to choose their dirtiest period of the past decade as a base line for setting acceptable pollution levels.

"Under this plan, an increase of millions of tons of pollutants would not be considered an increase," Lieberman said. "At a time when all of us are concerned about corporate accounting, it seems particularly ironic that this administration is trying to foist on us what I would call some very creative environmental accounting."

Environmentalists said they were pleased to see the issue become a high-profile political one.

"Senate Democrats -- and the presidential candidates among them -- clearly see an opportunity," said Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust. "The test will be whether they will really try to block Bush's rollbacks of the Clean Air Act."

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