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

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2004 by David Whitman

The Acid Rain program turned out to be a public policy success story at a fraction of its projected cost, and set a precedent for the use of emissions wading to reduce interstate air pollution. But it also marked a sharp departure from the litigation-ridden and loophole-laden procedures of the Clean Air Act, under which each state prepared its own plan for the EPA, one pollutant at a time, to regulate emissions within state boundaries. By the time Bush took office, even many environmentalists were searching for market-based "cap-and-trade" programs to curb power plant pollution rather than pursuing the traditional regimen of Clean Air Act enforcement.

Despite his support for the Acid Rain program and his steady advocacy of EPA's ambitious multi-pollutant proposal within the administration, Holmstead was soon pegged as an industry lackey during the battle over Clear Skies. He was the public face of the administration's industry-friendly campaign to dismantle new source review of old power plants, a program popular among lawyers in the EPNs enforcement division. Several of them later quit the agency in disgust and joined green advocates in routinely portraying Holmstead as a utility yes-man to reporters, an image solidified by a New York Times Magazine cover story in April 2004.

Scrubbers and mine workers

Yet if Holmstead was distrusted by some as too friendly with industry, he and the EPA were considered too close to environmental groups by those inside the White House and at the Department of Energy--both of which brimmed with former energy industry executives. Almost as soon as an interagency group formed to design Clear Skies, Energy staffers began challenging EPA's straw proposal. Unlike the soft-spoken Holmstead, his counterpart at the EPA, Energy's Frank Blake had a flair for dramatic sound bites about the damage that regulation inflicted on industry. "It became the Frank and Jeff show every week," recalls another member of the interagency group.

When the interagency process to draft Clear Skies began in earnest in summer 2001, the key decisions in reducing fine particle pollution were how low would the sulfur dioxide cap be set, and how long would power companies have to slash emissions. The lower the cap, the more lives that would be saved. Yet low caps would also force several hundred coal-fired plants to install expensive scrubbers at a cost that would run into the billions. Blake insisted that EPNs proposed cap was so low that it would to force a number of small coal-fired plants to close, and would raise electricity prices and strain relations with the coal industry. Eventually, Blake presented an Energy Department counterproposal that would have doubled the straw proposal's cap on sulfur dioxide emissions and allowed utilities to skip phasing in larger emission reductions over time.

With their deputies stalemated in the interagency group, the agency heads sought to reach agreement at a cabinet meeting in February 2002. The meeting was apparently inconclusive, and White House officials made an executive decision to roughly split the differences between EPA and Energy's emission caps and schedules to create what now became Clear Skies.