Posted: 09/16/2003
Recent Rule Changes Will Help Economy While Not Hurting Environment
September 16, 2003 – President Bush this week is promoting two recent environmental rule changes. According to experts with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), neither of these changes will negatively impact the environment, but they do have the potential to spur economic development.
The first change is a clarification and relaxation of the conditions under which New Source Review (NSR) is triggered for existing industrial facilities. Environmental activists and other critics of the administration have wrongly claimed the NSR changes amount to a rollback of the Clean Air Act that will cause massive increases in air pollution. According to National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) Adjunct Scholar Joel Schwartz, “the rhetoric on this issue has reached new extremes of alarmism and hyperbole.”
NSR is a provision of the Clean Air Act that requires older industrial plants to install modern pollution controls when they undertake major plant modifications.
Schwartz notes that the NSR changes won’t affect air pollution emissions, because a wide range of other regulations require large pollution reductions in coming years, and/or set hard, declining caps on pollution that can’t be exceeded, regardless of NSR. For example:
- EPA’s “NOx SIP Call” regulation will reduce eastern power plant and industrial boiler nitrogen oxide emissions by 60 percent next year during the May-September “ozone season.” This is a hard, system-wide cap that can’t be exceeded and is not affected by NSR. The acid rain program for sulfur dioxide sets a similar declining cap that is reducing year-round emissions by a total of 50 percent between 1995 and 2010.
- EPA has also issued more than 70 air toxics rules for industry-including petroleum refineries and chemical plants-that require “Maximum Achievable Control Technology” (MACT) and that are unaffected by NSR changes.
- EPA standards require a 90 percent reduction in new-car and new diesel-truck emissions during the next few years, which will eliminate almost all mobile-source pollution during the next two decades as the fleet turns over.
The second rule change is an end to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ban on the sale of real estate contaminated with PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, which the EPA classifies as a probable carcinogen. The EPA would require buyers rather than sellers of abandoned manufacturing plants, industrial sites and buildings to clean up any PCB tainted material found therein.
“This could be critical in kick-starting inner-city redevelopment while improving the environment in many urban areas,” said NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett. “This simple change could start job growth and boost tax revenues for cities, states and counties at a time when employment rates are stagnant and government budgets are increasingly stretched beyond their limits.
The change reverses the policy that discouraged development and encouraged property owners to hide contamination.
- Under the former policy, more than 400,000 brownfield sites sat idle and abandoned because their owners feared to have them tested for contamination since they would then be responsible for the cleanup.
- The new policy, by contrast, provides current owners with an incentive to have their buildings and lots tested, since sites that test clean could then be sold and/or redeveloped.
- At a minimum, this will help identify locations containing potentially harmful levels of PCB’s.
- Potential buyers could then weigh the risk of investing in a property and negotiate with current owners to purchase a contaminated property at a discounted price in light of the anticipated costs of cleaning up the site for future productive use.
“Since no environmental standards are lowered, it is hard to see how this policy change is anything but a win, win situation for the economy and the environment,” said Burnett.