By Lindsay Beebe, Senior Campaign, Representative for the Beyond Coal Campaign
Six years ago, almost to the day, I stood at the edge of Island in Sky, gazing across the White Rim Trail and the vast expanse of undulating canyon walls in the distance. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 8 Director at that time, Sean McGrath, stood next to me as he chatted with then-Canyonlands National Park Superintendent Kate Cannon about the impact of haze and nearby coal pollution on one of Utah’s most famous vistas. It was a stellar afternoon for July on the Colorado Plateau, 85 degrees and crystal blue skies with just a hint of cloud. Standing at that precipice, we could see the shadowy rise of Navajo Mountain more than 100 miles to the south on the Arizona border. It was the kind of day that can be hard to come by these days, since air quality monitoring by the National Park Service has shown that Canyonlanland and Arches are obscured by anthropogenic haze 83% of the time.
The largest single contributor to that haze is the unchecked pollution, specifically nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, that spew from the stacks at Hunter Power Plant in Castle Dale, and Huntington Power Plant in Huntington, located as a crow flies 70 miles northwest up and over the San Rafael Swell. Those two coal plants in particular had delayed or escaped compliance with what’s known as the Regional Haze Rule of the Clean Air Act for a number of years by 2015, allowing them to continue to emit NOx unabated. The Regional Haze Rule is designed to incrementally reduce source pollution that impacts what’s called “Class 1 Areas,” otherwise known as our treasured National Parks and some Wilderness areas, returning those wild places to natural visibility by 2064. That’s why I was grateful and relieved that, less than a year after that site visit, EPA Region 8 made the decision to require that the best available technologies be implemented at Utah’s power plants to scrub thousands of tons of pollution from our skies and our five world-renowned Parks.
But, as with many fights to protect our public lands in Utah, it hasn’t been all sunshine and hiking. The path to cleaner air has been, and continues to be, long, winding, and painstaking. Despite challenges, we have a plan.
The 2016 Utah Regional Haze Rule was finalized in June, after nine years of planning and stakeholder input. The rule was promulgated by the EPA only after six failed attempts by the state of Utah to comply with the Clean Air Act provision requiring the oldest and dirtiest park polluting sources to limit their harm to national parks. With each proposal put forward by Utah, the EPA gave the state another opportunity to amend its shortcomings; time and time again the state chose to repackage its plan without making any substantive improvements. In the end, the EPA put forward two proposals for public comment—the plan that cut 10,000 tons of nitrogen oxide pollution and the state’s plan that required no new pollution reductions. The 2016 rule was the product of robust interagency consultation, transparent and vigorous public involvement, including more than 47,000 public comments, and significant technical and legal analysis. It was also the product of dedicated and vigilant public servants applying reasoned decision-making at the EPA. Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and Utah suffered some of the worst of those impacts in 2017.
As the Trump Administration set out on their zealous anti-science crusade, one of the biggest casualties was the Environmental Protection Agency. According to an analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the EPA lost nearly 750 scientists between 2017 and 2020, including 1 in 4 of their environmental protection specialists. Utah’s Region 8 was among the hardest hit, losing 15% of the science staff in the region. Adding insult to injury, an EPA helmed by climate-denying coal lobbyists and functionally impaired, was no defense against the State of Utah’s eventual legal attack on the final Regional Haze Rule. The proverbial fox was guarding the hen house, and the EPA set about reversing it’s 2016 final rule and approving Utah’s “no additional pollution control” plan. After three years of unscientific political theatre, the Trump Administration approved the Utah State Implementation Plan in January of 2020, allowing Hunter and Huntington to pump more than 30,000,000 lbs of NOx into the air each year.
It has been five years since the EPA first decided that Hunter and Huntington needed to install what's called “selective catalytic reduction” technology, and yet the coal plants stand uncontrolled. A recent analysis by our partners at the National Parks Conservation Association has shown that Hunter Power Plant is the 4th largest single source of haze pollution in the entire country, and the 2nd most polluting power plant.
Thankfully, an accredited and trusted public servant, Michael Regan, now heads the EPA and is working to rebuild what has been dismantled. Unfortunately, he cannot replenish the resource that has most critically been wasted: time. That’s why the Sierra Club and our partners cannot afford to pull punches. We have recently proposed a comprehensive, innovative “National Federal Implementation Plan” for Regional Haze that would clean up all the coal plants that have escaped compliance with Round 1 of the Regional Haze Rule, which includes plants in Utah, Wyoming, Texas, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania.
This type of cross-state strategy has never before been implemented, but it is responsive to the scope and scale of delay and damage that was done during the Trump era. Specifically, it would reinstate the 2016 Haze rule in Utah that requires the installation of the best available control technology on Hunter and Huntington power plants. We have asked EPA to act quickly, and propose a draft rule by October of this year, with a request to finalize by February 2022. Now, we await EPA’s response, to understand if they will start to earnestly undertake this proposed rulemaking.
Stay tuned for upcoming opportunities urging EPA to take action. And, in the meantime, there’s no better time to write to your local newspaper and remind your neighbors about the urgency and impact of cleaning up our dirtiest coal plants. It’s past time for industry to take responsibility for the full cost of burning coal, and stop forcing us to pay for the burden of the pollution and the associated public health impacts.
