By Joshua Smith, Senior Attorney, Environmental Law Program
Trump’s polluter-friendly EPA is at it again. You may have missed this in the news. We get it. It’s hard to keep track of all the environmental rollbacks in the works. But that’s why we’re here.
Just days before proposing to gut President Obama’s landmark Clean Power Plan and replace it with a transparent attempt to prop up the failing coal industry, as well as many of the nation’s oldest and dirtiest power plants, EPA proposed to ignore its responsibility to protect places like Big Bend National Park and scrap an Obama-era haze cleanup plan for Texas, which would have reduced dangerous sulfur dioxide pollution from Texas coal plants by approximately 194,000 tons per year. (Yes, you read that right.)
These reductions would have resulted not only in clearer scenic views in places like Big Bend in Texas and Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma, but also widespread public health benefits in major cities like Dallas, Houston, and Oklahoma City. A public health analysis found that the proposal would save more than 600 lives every year.
For a bit of background: Texas coal-fired power plants emit more lung-irritating and haze-causing sulfur dioxide pollution than 25 other states combined. This is primarily because the vast majority of the state’s coal plants lack modern pollution controls. Luminant’s Martin Lake coal-burning power plant, for example, emits approximately 50 times more sulfur dioxide pollution than plants fitted with modern “scrubbers.” Scrubbers remove sulfur dioxide before it exits the plant’s smokestacks. This equipment has been installed in hundreds of other facilities around the country. Because the vast majority of Texas plants lack modern scrubbers, they also rank among the nation’s biggest polluters of mercury and harmful particulate matter.
Under the Clean Air Act’s Regional Haze program, which Congress enacted to protect air quality in national parks and wilderness areas, the Obama EPA had proposed to require many of Texas’s largest and dirtiest plants to meet emission limits for sulfur dioxide consistent with modern “scrubbers.”
The Obama EPA’s proposal was the result of public advocacy and a lawsuit brought by Sierra Club, Earthjustice, National Parks Conservation Association, and other allies to compel the agency to finally act and put out a plan as required by the Clean Air Act. In the original proposal, EPA conducted a rigorous analysis and found that sulfur pollution from Texas coal-fired power plants contributes significantly to haze in national parks and refuges in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico and other states. Sulfur pollution is is both ugly and dangerous. It reacts in the air to form “fine particulate” pollution that we can see as hazy skies over the Guadalupe Mountains and that penetrates sensitive parts of the lungs and can aggravate respiratory and heart diseases in communities all across Texas.
Instead of requiring Texas’s aging fleet to come into compliance with modern, industry-standard emission controls, the Trump EPA’s proposal announced last week scraps a common-sense plan in favor of a sham plan that would allow Texas’s aging and uncontrolled coal plants to keep polluting at the same harmful levels.
Specifically, the EPA’s plan proposes to implement a weak pollution credit-trading program that flies in the face of how haze plans are supposed to work and how courts have approved these kinds of plans in the past. Astoundingly, this includes allowing several power plants that will have already retired to continue polluting. This pollution give-away would allow the owners of those already-retired plants to transfer their pollution credits to other coal plants, effectively relieving those utilities of any obligation to reduce pollution at their remaining plants. The net effect of a weak trading program that includes emissions from already retired plants is an unlawful, impractical rule befitting the Trump administration’s misguided efforts to prop up a dangerous, outdated, and expensive industry. Studies show that coal plants, including in Texas, can be replaced by more cost-effective clean sources like wind, solar, and energy efficiency.
Despite the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to scrap clean air protections and prop up its friends in the fossil-fuel industry, Sierra Club and its clean air allies aim to see that they don’t get off so easy.
You can help by submitting your personal comments on this plan, which fails to require any pollution reductions at all and to protect our most special places. Read the proposal for yourself here.
Submit your comments, identified by Docket No. EPA-R06-OAR-2016-0611 at http://www.regulations.gov or via email at R6_TX-BART@epa.gov. The deadline to submit comments is Oct. 26.
If you are able to deliver your comments in person, the EPA is hosting a public hearing on Sept. 26 in Austin, Texas.
Stay tuned for more information about this rule and other ways you can support clean air and clean energy!