Posted: 06/01/2005
Clean Air Legal Squabbles Predictable
NCPA E-Team Scholars Say Lawsuits Will Squander Scarce Resources
DALLAS (May 23, 2005) – Scarce resources that could better have been devoted to improving air quality and reducing air pollution under the Clear Skies bill are being diverted to fight legal battles over Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations to limit sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury, according to scholars with the NCPA’s E-Team project.
“The Clear Skies legislation contained more cost-effective pollution reductions and would have been law, not regulation, and therefore would have been more difficult to challenge in court,” said NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett. “Prolonged challenges of EPA regulations pose a greater hazard to human health than Clear Skies.”
Environmentalists are letting their vision of the “perfect” interfere with achieving some environmental good. For example, a coalition of 11 states filed suit against the EPA in federal court yesterday challenging the agency’s mercury emission rules. Earlier this year, 9 states filed suit over the Bush Administration’s exemption of coal-fired plants from parts of the Clean Air Act.
Environmentalists, in their ongoing irrational attacks on any policy the Bush administration proposes, are ignoring the fact that under either Clear Skies or the current regulations, the U.S. will be the only country on earth to limit mercury emissions from power plants. U.S. companies are so efficient that they produce only a small percentage of the overall atmospheric mercury emitted by humans into the atmosphere – developing countries overseas are responsible for an increasing portion of the world’s other air pollutants, including most human-induced mercury emissions.
“Though the timetable for emission reductions was longer under Clear Skies, the affected industries would have would have had incentive to replace polluting technologies sooner rather than later,” Dr. Burnett said. “Rather than installing a specific technology for each source of pollution, they would likely have shut down the least efficient, most polluting, plants entirely which would result in quick, substantial reductions.”