New Source Review Won't Harm Air Quality: NCPA's Schwartz Says 'Extreme Rhetoric Is Completely Disconnected from Reality' 8/28/2003
From: Sean Tuffnell of the National Center For Policy Analysis, 800-859-1154 or stuffnell@ncpa.org WASHINGTON, Aug. 28 -- The Bush administration released a final rule late yesterday that clarifies and relaxes the conditions under which New Source Review (NSR) is triggered for existing industrial facilities. Environmental activists and other critics of the administration have wrongly claimed the NSR changes amount to a rollback of the Clean Air Act that will cause massive increases in air pollution. According to National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) Adjunct Scholar Joel Schwartz, "the rhetoric on this issue has reached new extremes of alarmism and hyperbole." NSR is a provision of the Clean Air Act that requires older industrial plants to install modern pollution controls when they undertake major plant modifications. "The extremity of the rhetoric is matched only by its almost complete disconnection with reality," said NCPA Adjunct Scholar Joel Schwartz. "Not only will pollution not increase; no policy maker, no matter how tenacious or determined, can stop continued reductions in air pollution." Schwartz notes that the NSR changes won't affect air pollution emissions, because a wide range of other regulations require large pollution reductions in coming years, and/or set hard, declining caps on pollution that can't be exceeded, regardless of NSR. For example: -- EPA's "NOx SIP Call" regulation will reduce eastern power plant and industrial boiler nitrogen oxide emissions by 60 percent next year during the May-September "ozone season." This is a hard, system-wide cap that can't be exceeded and is not affected by NSR. The acid rain program for sulfur dioxide sets a similar declining cap that is reducing year-round emissions by a total of 50 percent between 1995 and 2010. -- EPA has also issued more than 70 air toxics rules for industry-including petroleum refineries and chemical plants-that require "Maximum Achievable Control Technology" (MACT) and that are unaffected by NSR changes. -- EPA standards require a 90 percent reduction in new-car and new diesel-truck emissions during the next few years, which will eliminate almost all mobile-source pollution during the next two decades as the fleet turns over. "NSR needs to be reformed, as the current regulations actually slow progress on air pollution by creating perverse incentives to keep older plants running," said Schwartz. "Those who attack NSR reform display a profound ignorance of the factors that really affect future air pollution and a disregard for the harm to consumers of unnecessarily expensive regulations like New Source Review." For more information or to speak with Joel Schwartz, contact the NCPA's E-Team at 800-859-1154. ------ The NCPA is an internationally known nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute with offices in Dallas and Washington, D. C. that advocates private solutions to public policy problems. We depend on the contributions of individuals, corporations and foundations that share our mission. The NCPA accepts no government grants. |