REGIONAL HAZE BEAT

EPA’s Rule Offers Little Reprieve For Western Skies

By Amy Brouillette, 6-16-05

The assault on Western wilderness areas continues, as the EPA today rolled out new guidelines regulating how states should manage industrial pollution junking up skies in national parks—a measure that includes weakened emission standards in several key areas affecting embattled national parks here in the west.

The agency’s new regulations slashed certain emission-reduction goals for the region's largest coal-fired power plants in half, from the proposed 60 to 65 percent to 30 percent, a rule which has serious implications for worsening air quality in the Four Corners region of the Colorado Plateau, dubbed the “Golden Circle� of national parks and wilderness areas, according to a press release from the Environmental Defense Fund. Specifically, according to the Environmental Defense fund, the rule allows coal-fired power plants to continue pumping out toxic nitrogen oxides (NOx) at increasing rates.

A hotly contested issue pitting Western industry and the EPA against environmentalists and green lawyers, the agency’s ruling follows years of legal wrangling over Best Available Retrofit Technology (otherwise known as BART), a measure of the 1977 Clean Air Act aimed at reducing industrial emissions from coal-fired power plants, industrial boilers, pulp and paper mills, steel mills, petroleum refineries, chemical facilities, cement plants and smelters up skies in 156 national parks and wilderness areas. (Protected national parks include Acadia, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, Mount Rainier, Rocky Mountain, Shenandoah, Yellowstone and Yosemite.)

In 2003, the Environmental Defense Fund, a New York-based non-profit with an outpost here in Boulder, successfully sued the EPA for failing to enforce BART regulations, forcing the agency to finalize guidelines for large industrial plants built between 1962 and 1977. The agency scrambled late into the day Wednesday to meet a court-imposed June 15th deadline, already pushed back once from April 15. The final regulations puts it on states to identify industrial polluters by 2007.

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