EPA

In the News with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson:

“Bush backs allowing relaxed air quality rule.”
As reported by John Heilprin (The Associated Press)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Friday October 14, 2005

Stephen Johnson, with the full backing of his boss in the White House, announced on October 13, 2005 that the EPA would begin an effort to relax emissions restrictions on coal burning power plants in the United States. This measure would affect around 55% of America’s electrical generating plants, and the dirtiest sector of the industry at that. Coal burning plants are the greatest polluters out of all forms of electricity generation.
Mr. Johnson claims that removing the current restrictions on emissions imposed by the Clean Air Act, restrictions which have been in place for over 25 years, would help speed up the development of coal burning technology. “We want to remove any unnecessary regulatory obstacles,” says the man who is supposed to be in charge of protecting our environment. Last time I checked, protecting America’s natural resources didn’t mean handing industry a license to pollute even more than it already does.
Even under the Clean Air Act, coal burning plants continued to “produce millions of tons of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide blamed for smog, acid rain, and soot and other fine particles that lodge in people’s lungs and cause asthma and other respiratory ailments,” says John Heilprin of the Associated Press. Now, maybe Mr. Johnson doesn’t realize this, because his Master’s Degree is in Pathology (George Washington University), not Ecology, but I’m sure that somebody somewhere in the halls of the EPA has to know that we don’t fix this problem by allowing more than 600 electrical plants to put even more of this stuff into the air.
Perhaps I’m just over reacting. Perhaps I’m blowing this out of proportion. Maybe, reducing restrictions on power plants will actually motivate them to clean up their acts. Maybe. But I’d love to know how.

-Tim Adamo