Victory: A Break In the Smog

Excerpted from a March 24, 2006, editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia blocked the Bush administration’s four-year effort to cripple a key Clean Air Act provision.

The case turned on a provision of the act called “new source review,” which applies to more than 1,300 coal-fired power plants and at 17,000 emissions-spewing refineries, chemical plants and other factories.

The law requires utilities and industrial polluters to install new emissions controls at older facilities if they significantly increase pollution in the course of changing their plants or operations. Its most important application has been to aging, highly polluting coal-fired power plants.

Vice President Dick Cheney…pressured the Environmental Protection Agency to devise a way to circumvent the requirement (even though) the EPA’s own contractor on air issues found that 41 of these older power plants were associated with up to 5,600 premature deaths and 111,000 asthma attacks in a single year.

The federal judges said that “only in a Humpty-Dumpty world” could the discredited EPA rules be viewed as consistent with the law or congressional intent.

Humpty-Dumpty world. George W. Bush world. Increasingly, it seems the same thing.