Partly sunny: why enviros can't admit that Bush's Clear Skies initiative isn't half bad

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2004 by David Whitman

It is hard to find a leading environmental advocate who has not denounced Clear Skies, the Bush administration's bill to reduce power-plant pollution. Clear Skies headed the Kerry campaign's list of "The Bush/Cheney Top 10 Environmental Insults," and has been repeatedly assailed by green activists for gutting the historic Clean Air Act. Al Gore has said that Clear Skies should be renamed "Dirty Skies." The proposal has become a prime exhibit for those who delight in examples of Bush doublespeak.

Yet this vitriol seems strangely at odds with the express goals of the legislation. Clear Skies requires utilities to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury by about 70 percent by 2018. The Environmental Protection Agency projects Clear Skies will prevent the deaths of 14,100 Americans a year--akin, in a sheer body count, to saving the life of every person who died from HIV in the United States in 2003.

By most accounts, Clear Skies would prevent more deaths than any environmental regulation since 1997 at a cost of about $6 billion a year to the utility industry. But instead of garnering broad support and sailing through Congress, this important public health measure has languished on Capitol Hill. It is now little more than a symbol of the Bush administration's craven coziness with the energy industry.

As might be expected, green advocates criticized the Bush bill and its regulatory heir, the Clean Air Interstate Rule, for failing to go far enough or fast enough in reducing pollution. But in a novel twist, environmentalists have also asserted that Clear Skies is actually weaker than the existing Clean Air Act--and would thus allow millions of tons of added pollution and inflict tens of thousands of needless deaths during the next decade. John Kerry summed up the conventional wisdom on the left during his second debate with President Bush by observing that Clear Skies is "one of those Orwellian names.... If they just left the Clean Air Act all alone the way it is today--no change--the air would be cleaner than it is if you passed the Clear Skies Act."

In fact, this oft-repeated green bromide turns out to be false. But the dispute over the bill's impact is only part of the story of how the perfect has become the enemy of the good in the clean air wars. The battle over Clear Skies has shaped up as a classic Washington tale of a creditable endeavor hopelessly mismanaged by its sponsor, demagogued by its opponents, and tainted from the start by the administration's well-earned reputation as handmaidens of industry. The resulting gridlock could delay attempts to clean up the environment and cost thousands of Americans their lives.

The soot menace

Not often do you find environmentalists and utility industry representatives sitting down at the same table, much less nearing agreement. But when George W. Bush took office in 2001, several utilities and green groups had begun to explore a groundbreaking deal. Under its terms, EPA would provide utilities with some future relief from complex and costly "new source review" rules governing the modernization of old power plants--the bane of coal-fired utilities. (New source review requires plants grandfathered under the Clean Air Act to install modern pollution-control equipment whenever upgrades or non-routine maintenance of a plant increase air pollution.) The Clinton administration had sued seven electric utilities for trying to sidestep this requirement, charging that the companies had made substantial modifications to old coal-fired plants under the guise of routine maintenance and failed to install this new technology. Many utilities had opted to go to court, but they were eager to avoid future punitive actions.

In exchange for prospective relief from new source review, the power companies were prepared to accelerate their air-pollution reductions through a market-based permit system. Even more significant, several electricity generators were, for the first time, contemplating capping emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas implicated in global warming. Reflecting the emerging consensus, seven different lawmakers had introduced multi-pollutant legislation in the House or Senate in 1999 that sought to compel utilities to cut back on such emissions, including carbon dioxide.

In the 2000 campaign, Bush effectively signed on to the potential deal, pledging both to revamp new source review and to support market-based legislation to cap power plant emissions of four smokestack pollutants, including carbon dioxide. By the time he assumed office the following year, Bush appeared on the verge of achieving the clean air deal of a decade.

Green advocates saw Bush's pledge as a major advance despite his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to curb greenhouse emissions. Then, as now, the EPA did not regulate carbon dioxide as an air pollutant, nor did the federal government require industry to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. No matter who was elected, Congress was not going to ratify the Kyoto Protocol anytime soon. But capping carbon dioxide emissions from power plants was a good start for environmentalists and would set an important precedent for imposing mandatory restrictions.