Bush Under Fire Over Clean Air Plan

Major changes to clean air rules for utilities, refineries and manufacturers were being formally issued Tuesday by the Bush administration, prompting a court challenge from a coalition of New England and mid-Atlantic states.

Meanwhile, environmental advocates were more receptive to several separate proposals being discussed by the administration to require heavy construction vehicles and other large off-road machinery meet tougher emissions requirements and use cleaner diesel fuel.
The Environmental Protection Agency's easing of certain requirements of the Clean Air Act's "New Source Review" program was being published in the Federal Register. The program affects whether expensive new anti-pollution equipment must be installed when industrial facilities are modernized.

"We think what they are doing is contrary to the Clean Air Act and it is fundamentally injurious to the American public," Eliot Spitzer, New York's attorney general, said in an interview.

EPA Administrator Christie Whitman has said the new rules would encourage emissions reductions by giving utilities and refinery operators new flexibility. The old program, she said, "deterred companies from implementing projects that would increase energy efficiency and decrease air pollution."

EPA spokesman Joe Martyak said that "what we went final with we feel will be a positive for the environment."

But Spitzer said the new rules would contribute to thousands more cases of asthma and other respiratory ailments. He and his counterparts in at least a half-dozen other states say they are harmed by smog and acid rain from the nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants and other industrial sources.

They planned to file a lawsuit Tuesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Spitzer said New York would be joined by Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont in the lawsuit, with Maryland and Vermont also expected to petition the appeals court to review the new rule.

According to Spitzer's office, the lawsuit focuses on four elements of the new rules affecting new technology, a new emissions test, a revised approach for calculating emissions levels and a cap on pollution levels set according to entire plants rather than specific components being upgraded.

Spitzer said the publishing of the final rule on New Year's Eve, when much of the public's attention is diverted, was further evidence the administration "continues to try to hide its domestic agenda under the cloak of darkness."

Environmental groups also planned to join in the legal challenge to the administration.

Environmentalists were more welcoming of the administration's push to clean up the off-road vehicle fleets.

The EPA is expected to send a proposal to the White House next month on dealing with pollution from the off-road vehicles, administration officials said Monday. They said a formal proposal is planned for the spring, with a final rule to come a year later.

Diesel-powered vehicles from huge earth movers to harvesting combines used in agriculture account for more pollution, especially microscopic soot linked to respiratory problems, than the trucks and buses on the nation's highways. Health officials say these emissions account for 8,500 premature deaths annually as well as increased cases of asthma and other respiratory ailments.

A tentative proposal before the EPA would require the amount of sulfur in diesel used in off-road vehicles to be slashed within the next decade from the current 3,000 parts per million to 15 parts per million. The proposal also calls for tough new emission standards on new engines for off-road vehicles, requiring engine manufacturers to install modern emission controls.

Together these proposals would cut off-road diesel emissions by as much as 95 percent, according to the EPA and private health and environmental groups.

This will bring the off-road vehicles and the fuel they use under essentially the same requirements as large over-the-road trucks and buses under a separate set of rules already approved by the EPA.

EPA officials said Monday that the tentative off-road vehicle proposal,
some details of which still must be worked out, would call for a two-phase program for sulfur reduction in diesel. Sulfur content would be cut to 500 parts per million by 2007 and to 15 parts per million three years after that. The new engine emission standards would kick in 2010 or shortly thereafter.

In an attempt to reduce cost and increase flexibility, the rules also would allow trading of emissions credits among manufactures of engines used by both off-road and highway vehicles, the officials said. An engine manufacturer might get owners of a truck or bus fleet to retrofit older vehicles voluntarily and, in turn, get credits that can be used to meet the new off-road vehicle requirements, according to EPA officials.

Details of such a trading system have yet to be worked out, the officials caution.