ARKANSAS SIERRA CLUB RESPONSE TO EPA APPROVAL OF A WEAK CLEAN AIR PLAN FOR ARKANSAS

Little Rock, AR. -- Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved a weak clean air plan for Arkansas. This plan weakens protections for Arkansans that were developed in 2012, encourages continued use of aging and dirty coal-fired power plants, and does little to reduce the nitrogen oxides that contribute to haze in our parks and wilderness areas, and ozone smog in cities like St. Louis and Memphis.

Major polluters in Arkansas are required to take action on reducing pollution that clouds the skies in certain national parks and wilderness areas like the Upper Buffalo River and Caney Creek Wilderness. The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) failed to take action on addressing this pollution, resulting in the U.S. EPA being required by federal law to step in and write a plan for Arkansas. In 2016, the federal plan was ultimately approved while shortly after the approval, the state of Arkansas sued to block the federal plan and write its own plan that they refused to write in previous years.

In its recent release, EPA and Arkansas officials congratulated themselves for this alarming development of rolling back clean air safeguards and allowing more pollution.

In response to today's action, the Arkansas Sierra Club issued the following statement from its Director, Glen Hooks:

"It’s a shame to see federal and state officials casting aspersions on the previous process--all the while ignoring the state agency's significant role in delaying clean air protections for Arkansans and residents of nearby states.

The notion that a federal regional haze plan was 'imposed' on Arkansas is ridiculous. Congress ordered states to clean up coal plant haze pollution in 1990. The State of Arkansas got an extension, and then the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality was supposed to submit a plan by 2007. ADEQ did not do so until 2011, twenty-one years after Congress acted.  The late ADEQ plan was largely disapproved because Arkansas failed to meet its basic requirements of the Clean Air Act’s Regional Haze Program,  and ADEQ refused to submit a revised plan that actually required polluters to reduce emissions.  Once that happened, federal law required that U.S. EPA write a plan for Arkansas.  EPA wrote a draft plan, held a public hearing in Little Rock, ook hundreds of public comments from Arkansans, and finalized the plan in 2016.  After all of that, now the state has sued to block the federal plan and is finally writing its own weak plan--27 years after Congress told states to clean up haze emissions in 1990.

Simply put, due to ADEQ's delay and litigation, cleaning up smog in Arkansas's national parks and wilderness areas is decades behind schedule.  The 2012 federal plan went after the oldest, most inefficient, and dirtiest sources of air pollution in our states and contained strong action steps. ADEQ's decade-late replacement plan is weak and toothless, and will not require our state's oldest and dirtiest coal-burning power plants to do much of anything.  Real action on pollution requires real leadership, not simply bowing down to big polluters.

In short:  today's action amounts to EPA rejecting its own clean air plan that it wrote and approved in 2016, in favor of a much weaker state plan in 2018 while patting itself on the back for its so-called environmental leadership.  Arkansans can see this for what it is --an effort to dismantle clean air protections for our parks while propping up the dirty coal plants that foul them."