Unclearing the air

[Theophylact]

Long but good article in the New York Times Magazine on how

the administration has managed to effect a radical transformation of the nation's environmental laws, quietly and subtly, by means of regulatory changes and bureaucratic directives. Overturning new-source review -- the phrase itself embodies the kind of dull, eye-glazing bureaucrat-speak that distracts attention -- represents the most sweeping change, and among the least noticed.

[Target]

Having long flouted the new-source review law, many of the nation's biggest power companies were facing, in the last months of the 1990's, an expensive day of reckoning. E.P.A. investigators had caught them breaking the law. To make amends, the power companies were on the verge of signing agreements to clean up their plants, which would have delivered one of the greatest advances in clean air in the nation's history. Then George W. Bush took office, and everything changed.

And to think, they (power co's) put this off for 25 years, were about to get punished for their procrastination and have to clean up their act, and then GW bailed them out.....how nice.

[Target]

I see that none of the normal Bush defenders/haters have weighed in on this thread yet.

For those of you that thought the article was too long to read, think about it again.... it was well worth reading through all 11 pages!!!

[Gomer]

Did not read the article theo posted yet... but I did come across this in my daily jaunt through cyberspace. From the Easterblogg (Greg Easterbrook, aka TMQ)

http://www.tnr.com/easterbrook.mhtml?pid=1529

ANOTHER OVERSTATED NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE STORY: "Up in Smoke: The Bush Administration, the Big Power Companies and the Undoing of 30 Years of Clean Air Policy." So blares the cover of yesterday's New York Times Magazine. Author Bruce Barcott isn't responsible for the headline, but might not it have occurred to some editor somewhere at the Times Magazine that there is nothing in the 13-page article that supports a claim of "undoing" clean air policy? All pollution regulated by the Clean Air Act is declining, has been declining for years, and continues to decline under George W. Bush. That's not mentioned in the 13 pages, since it would more or less spoil the entire premise of the story and the dramatic cover. No factual statement in the Times Magazine piece appears wrong, but the article systematically ignores counter-arguments and counter-facts in order to create a picture that is, overall, inaccurate.

snip

If the latter, the Times Magazine author is not alone, as for two years The New York Times' front page and editorial page both have featured articles expressing outrage about Bush changes in new-source review, yet rarely, if ever, mentioned that pollution is declining. Here, figures 11 through 22 graphically display trends in pollution blowing from the Ohio Valley to the Northeast in the last decade--a big decline in acid rain and a moderate decline in nitrogen oxides. Most of this decline came under the version of the new-source rule that Bush just put back into effect, since the tightened Clinton version only was around a couple of years. That is to say, Midwest power-plant pollution went down under the old regulation whose restoration by Bush is now depicted as a disaster.

Elliot Spitzer, Senator James Jeffords, and others who make extravagant claims about the Bush new-source rule change never mention the complication that actual trends in air pollution are so inconveniently positive. True, trends might be even more positive had the Clinton-written rule remained in effect. Clinton's version of the rule was a good job and could have been left to stand; Browner, a very level-headed and reasonable person, put an awful lot of work into her rule and wanted it to be fair to utilities. (Power companies exaggerate the costs of new-source compliance just as enviros exaggerate the degree of emissions.) But the worst-case scenario for Bush's rule is that it will slow the future rate of pollution decline--which hardly sounds like the undoing of 30 years of clean-air policy, does it?

Finally, the Times Magazine story ignores or buries the really inconvenient complication that the Bush White House has taken some steps to make air pollution regulation more strict. Bush has put into force three powerful new pollution-reduction rules, one written by Browner and the others composed under Bush. One new rule mandates that diesel engines of trucks and buses be much cleaner; a second new rule mandates that "off road" power plants such as outboard motors and construction-machine engines be much cleaner; a third requires refineries to reduce the inherent pollution content of diesel fuel, this last rule enacted over the howls of Bush's core constituency, the oil boys. Taken together, these three new rules are the most important anti-pollution initiative since the 1991 Clean Air Act amendments that cracked down on acid rain. And because studies show that diesel fumes are bad for public health, Bush's new rules should produce at least as much public-health gain as the strictest interpretation of the new-source standard. Yet not a word of this in the Times Magazine article, since mention would undercut the premise.

snip

Grudgingly, on the last of its 13 pages, the Times Magazine article allows that Bush's January regulations might accomplish the goals of the Clinton new-source standard anyway, though doing so at lower cost. Poof! The entire story just disappeared. But how many people read all the way to the third-to-last paragraph, versus how many saw the doomsday cover?

Now the SUV tax credit fiasco and CAFE standards... that's a whole other story.

[Pexster]

Notice that the author of the piece critical of the NY Times doesn't mention anything about the revenue that was just essentially handed back to the power companies due to the gutting of the EPA enforcement actions. Is outright bribery an impeachable offense?