Fredericksburg, Va. — I think I've got a way of finding that "secure, undisclosed location" where they're keeping Vice President Cheney: Just look for a trail of energy-industry lobbyists and follow them.
The New York Times on Jan. 8 revealed that Cheney and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham are leading the charge inside the Bush administration to weaken a regulation that power companies have loathed for years even though it protects the lives of Americans.
At issue is a provision in the Clean Air Act called "new source review" that requires older coal-burning power plants (those that were in operation by 1977) to install the latest pollution-control equipment when upgrading their operations and significantly increasing emissions.
By the late 1990s, it seemed to many observers that power companies were getting around new source review requirements by palming off plant upgrades as "routine maintenance." These suspicions led the Justice Department and several Northeast states to file suit in November 1999 against 51 plants for alleged violation of the new source review provision.
But just when it looked as if the plants would have to clean up their act, things started to turn around for them.
You might remember that, once upon a time, there was a candidate named George W. Bush who unveiled an environmental agenda that he said would make electric utilities "reduce emissions and significantly improve air quality."
Well, candidate Bush became President Bush, and he tapped his vice president to put together an energy plan for the country. The vice president promptly was besieged (as reported by The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and The New York Times) by gaggles of energy-industry lobbyists, some of whom told him that the new source review rule was just too much for electric utilities to bear.
So the vice president's energy team called on the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy to look into matters to see if this Clean Air Act provision was hindering energy production.
The EPA finished a preliminary analysis, which found that Clean Air Act requirements did nothing to suppress energy production. But soon afterward, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Bush Justice Department had decided to freeze investigation of new source review cases anyway.
Fast-forward to the present, in which the vice president and the Energy Department chief plan to change new source review's definition of routine maintenance so that plants can do major overhauls without having to bother with modern pollution controls.
States involved in the suit against the power plants worry that this reinterpretation of new source review would undermine their case against the utilities. Six state attorneys general have said they would sue the Bush administration if it goes forward with the Cheney-Abraham revisions to the Clean Air Act.
Why care about this sordid little tale? Because power plants constitute the largest single source of air pollution, and some of the older plants currently dodging modern emission standards spew 10 times more smog-, soot- and acid rain-causing pollution than newer plants.
Moreover, these grandfathered plants represent about half of the nation's nearly 1,000 coal-fired plants. In Virginia, eight of the state's 10 coal-burning plants are these noxious old dinosaurs. So are numerous others in Virginia's "airshed," which includes parts of Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee.
But the main reason to care about a little-known provision in the Clean Air Act is your health or the health of people you care about. Private consultants working for the EPA have found that as many as 30,100 deaths a year are related to power-plant emissions.
Pollution from the plants involved in the lawsuit shortens the lives of between 5,500 and 9,000 people each year, EPA's consultants found; forcing these plants to meet modern pollution standards would avoid 4,300 to 7,000 of these deaths.
Given these numbers, how can Cheney and the rest of the fossil-fuel fetishists justify weakening the Clean Air Act? Maybe we should smoke the veep out of his hole and make him explain himself before we get smoked out of our communities by the dirty power plants.
Rick Mercier is a columnist for the Fredericksburg (Va.) Free LanceStar. His e-mail address is rmercier@freelancestar.com.
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