Power plants currently emit two-thirds of the sulfur dioxide in the air and are responsible for shortening the lives of an estimated 30,000 Americans every year. They release one quarter of the nitrogen oxides in the air, a primary cause of smog. In 1997, smog caused more than six million Americans to suffer asthma attacks and sent 160,000 Americans to the hospital in the Eastern U.S. alone. The Bush energy plan will increase sulfur dioxide by 50 percent and pump hundreds of thousands more tons of nitrogen oxides into the air. Bush's energy policy constitutes a chemical attack on American citizens far deadlier than anything we've yet faced from terrorists.
To sell his plan, President Bush is using the recent Northeast blackout and uproar over the national energy grid to present deadly clean air rollbacks as national energy policy. The administration's attack on American air quality is a dual-fronted effort to weaken pollution standards for power plants and then to significantly increase the number of dirty coal and oil-fired power plants nationwide. On Aug. 27, 2003, the EPA finalized the first of the Bush administration's rollbacks to our critical clean air laws, known as New Source Review (NSR). NSR is a 30-year-old loophole in the Clean Air Act that allows dirty power plants, built before the Act was updated in 1977, to evade modern emission standards, provided they do not undergo major renovations. Many politicians in the Northeast, including Mass. Republican Governor Mitt Romney, have worked to close this loophole in their states and force power plants to come up to modern health standards. By contrast, President Bush is moving in the opposite direction, urging Congress to allow the oldest, dirtiest plants to pollute more. The NSR rollback is like bringing coals to Newcastle, literally. The administration will allow the dirtiest, most dangerous and most deadly plants to burn more coal and oil and to increase their impact on the lungs of American citizens.
The Bush administration has tried to hide most of their attacks on American air quality with carefully timed policy announcements to minimize press coverage. The first attack on NSR was announced at a late Friday afternoon press conference on Nov. 22, 2002, the weekend before Thanksgiving. The Bush administration's EPA waited slightly more than a month to release more major rule changes, again attempting to minimize coverage by announcing clean air roll backs on Dec. 31, 2002-New Year's Eve. It is no secret to the Bush administration that their policies are wildly unpopular and will endanger the lives of American citizens.
The second half of Bush's dirty air plan will most likely come this fall in the form of the energy bill currently being debated in Congress as well as his ironically named "Clear Skies" proposal. The energy bill, created in the first year of the Bush administration by Vice-President Richard Cheney, is a grab bag of corporate subsidies and payouts to polluting energy producers. Although most known for its ill-advised effort to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the energy bill also contains billions of dollars in subsidies for coal, oil, gas and nuclear production. Cheney's plan ignores conservation and clean renewable energy and proposes the U.S. build more than 1,000 new coal-fired power plants.
So as to insure that these subsidies and new coal plants will have the maximum impact on the lungs of American citizens, this fall Bush will also be pushing his "Clear Skies" plan. The plan calls for gradual pollution reductions over the next twenty years but at a rate slower than that which the Clean Air Act already on the books. How then does the administration characterize "Clear Skies" as environmental protection? EPA Assistant Administrator Jeffery Holmstead explained that the Bush plan requires what he called the "Rip Van Winkle scenario." The Bush plan assumes that the EPA will go to sleep and not enforce the Clean Air Act for the next decade. Only by ignoring all current environmental laws can "Clear Skies" be seen as anything but more clean air rollbacks. As of yet the Bush administration has not been able to push this deadly legislation through Congress but undoubtedly it will be looking for an opportunity with the Senate and House back in session.
Together, the rollbacks of critical clean air laws and the plan to build more dirty, dangerous power plants are more than an environmental disaster; this is a public health crisis and a chemical attack on the American people. Congress should fight off the Bush administration's chemical warfare and pass an energy plan focused on clean renewable energy and conservation that will reduce our demand for both domestic and foreign petroleum sources. It will take strong steps to reduce the deadly impact of our energy production on American citizens. Unfortunately the Bush administration is moving boldly in the wrong direction.