Oversight committee chairman says EPA proposal threatens air quality at parks
Rule would allow consideration of emissions rates from proposed power plants on an average annual basis.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., Wednesday pushed EPA to drop a proposed rule he said would weaken air quality protections for national parks by making it easier to build pollution-heavy facilities nearby.
"I urge you to abandon this unsound proposal," Waxman wrote to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson. Despite opposition from its own experts, the agency plans to change methods for assessing air quality while considering permits for construction near national parks and wilderness areas with special environmental protections, Waxman said.
Documents provided by EPA in response to an August request by the committee "reveal a rulemaking gone awry," Waxman charged. "The agency's technical experts, the regional modeling staff, heavily criticized the proposal and said it 'would allow for significant degradation' of air quality in our national parks," Waxman said.
The proposed rule allows consideration of 24-hour and three-hour emission rates from proposed power plants on an average annual basis. But EPA technical staff said that change "would almost always mask a short-term concentration peak," Waxman wrote. In an e-mail last March, an agency analyst compared the proposal to "allowing a person to average all the variations in his driving speed over [an] entire year to see whether he is complying with the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit."
Waxman said other parts of the rule questioned by agency staff include a change that gives states conducting air quality reviews more authority to determine the period of time used to calculate emissions.
Another proposal in question, he said, would let plants that already received a variance for certain pollution sources exclude those from air quality calculations. EPA's Region 8 staff said the proposal is contrary to the Clean Air Act, the letter adds.
Charging that staff objections were ignored during "an insufficiently open process," Waxman gave Johnson until March 5 to explain his approval of the rule. An EPA spokesman declined to comment immediately but said, "EPA will review the letter and respond appropriately."