For more than one year now, the media and environmentalists have been predicting that President George W. Bush would relax portions of the Clean Air Act. And last week he appeared to do just that, announcing a fresh interpretation of the infamously confusing "new source review" (NSR) pollution rule that mainly governs old, coal-fired power plants in the Ohio Valley. Reaction could be characterized as unfavorable. "The most dramatic rollback of the Clean Air Act in history," "cbs News" quoted critics as pronouncing. "Once again, clean air takes a backseat to the polluters and the special interests," said Senator Tom Daschle. "This is a fundamental gutting of the Clean Air Act," fumed everyone"s man of the hour, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. The decision, opined Rebecca Stanfield of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, means "thousands of premature deaths per year that could have been prevented." Added New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli, "People"s lives will be lost because of what was decided today.... Lakes will be destroyed. Forests will be destroyed."

    In truth Bush"s NSR decision is of minor importance. It does little more than reduce the red tape associated with installing new equipment in power plants. Pollution is unlikely to increase as a result; there"s at least as good a chance the Bush NSR ruling will cause air emissions to drop. Beyond that, NSR, which the press has depicted as a centerpiece of pollution control, is actually one of the Clean Air Act"s less-important programs, impacting only a small percentage of total emissions. Beyond that, the supposed regulatory nightmare of NSR, which business repeatedly denounces as bureaucracy gone mad, isn"t nearly as bad as industry claims. Beyond even that, other anti-pollution proposals promise a far greater pollution reduction than even the environmentalists" preferred interpretation of NSR--yet these better ideas are being brushed aside as the left and right smash each other over a bunch of old Midwest power plants.

    In other words, environmentalists and some Democrats are drastically, perhaps even deceitfully, exaggerating NSR"s benefit while industry lobbyists and some Republicans are drastically, perhaps even deceitfully, exaggerating its harm. It"s a case study in how, in contemporary Washington, the media, lobbyists, enviros, and both parties bring out the worst in each other.

    Oxymoronically, NSR applies mainly to old sources. The Clean Air Act amendments of 1977 imposed strict standards on new power plants, refineries, and other industrial sites. But existing facilities won a grandfather clause that exempted coal-fired generating stations in the Midwest and a few other industrial operations from complying with the standards. The rationalization was that these old power plants would shut down soon anyway. A backstop provision stated that any grandfathered facility that did not shut down, and instead modernized or expanded, would be treated as if it were a new source--hence the rule"s perplexing name--triggering NSR to impose advanced pollution-control requirements.

    Unfortunately, both the grandfather clause and the NSR rule boomeranged. Because the grandfathered plants essentially had permission to continue emitting levels of pollution that new facilities could not, utilities had no incentive to replace them with new power plants, which would be much cleaner and more energy efficient but would require a substantial capital investment in pollution controls. (Modern pollution-abatement systems are extremely effective but add about 20 percent to the capital cost of a coal-power project.) Midwest utilities also had little incentive to add modern pollution-control equipment onto the old plants because (to simplify mildly) almost any change in a plant might invoke NSR. So the old generating stations stayed open and stayed dirty; today 51 of them, nearly all in the Midwest, emit a little less than one-third of all power plant air pollution, although they represent only about 11 percent of fossil-fueled electricity generation. NSR itself evolved into one of the most unwieldy, top-heavy federal regulatory programs, freighted by thousands of pages of proceedings on what the word "maintenance" means.

    The big air-pollution-control success stories--tailpipe restrictions on automobiles (begun in 1970 and tightened several times since) and the 1990 acid rain "trading" program, both of which have produced spectacular pollution reductions at a comparatively low cost--are fairly simple programs in which the government imposes a cutback and industry figures out how to comply. NSR, by contrast, is a command-and-control program, requiring regulators to pore over individual engineering diagrams on a case-by-case basis. The result, not surprisingly, has been high process costs, slow results, unintended consequences, and reams of litigation. And so in 1996 the Bill Clinton administration began an initiative to simplify NSR--an initiative of which, in some ways, Bush"s announcement is simply the end product.

    Various factors have coalesced to make NSR a hot-button issue. One is industry"s attempt to evade it, which has rightly aroused the ire of politicians and enviros--NSR may be an unwise law, but it is the law nonetheless. Some utilities have defied NSR so brazenly that even Attorney General John Ashcroft earlier this year rejected the request by Dick Cheney"s energy task force to end federal litigation against NSR evaders. The suit continues, helping keep NSR in the news.

    A less-edifying reason that greens focus on NSR is that with virtually all forms of pollution (except greenhouse gases) in steady decline, there are ever-fewer issues to be outraged about or to raise money on the backs of. According to the latest Index of Leading Environmental Indicators--an analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data published annually by the Pacific Research Institute, a nonpartisan think tank--national ozone levels have declined nearly 30 percent since 1976; acid rain levels have declined 65 percent; nitrogen oxide (a factor in smog) levels have declined 38 percent; and, since 1988, "particulates" (airborne soot) have declined 26 percent. Cars, trucks, buses, factories, outboard engines, construction equipment--just about everything gets cleaner every year, except for old Midwest power plants.

    This means the high-polluting anachronisms of the Ohio Valley are a real problem. But they"re hardly the catastrophe that environmentalists and prominent Democrats suggest. Announcing his support for Ashcroft"s decision, Spitzer said, "We hope that the Northeast will finally see improved air quality with reduced urban smog, acid rain, and respiratory disease." Yet the Northeast has been "seeing" progressively cleaner air for decades: The number of smog-alert days in New York City have declined dramatically since the early "90s, and the Big Apple was recently certified as in compliance with federal carbon monoxide ("winter smog") standards for the first time. The notion that Midwest power plants are causing a pollution disaster in the Northeast is sheer make-believe--but it serves Democratic "wedge issue" positioning, media potboiling, and enviro fund-raising.

    And if pols and greens have falsely depicted NSR as an environmental crisis, industry has falsely depicted it as a regulatory one for much the same reason: It"s getting harder and harder for the right to find environmental issues about which to become lathered. Though environmental policy could still become more user-friendly (especially through the introduction of market forces), over the past two decades most federal regulations have significantly reduced pollution without any harm to economic growth. The EPA, under William Reilly during Bush I, then under Carol Browner in the Clinton-Gore years, and now under Christie Todd Whitman, has worked assiduously to streamline rules and present a friendly face to business. For example, the 1990 rules that "reformulated" gasoline to reduce its pollution content were arrived at through amicable negotiation with industry, not through litigation or confrontation. Most of industry"s genuine complaints about environmental rules are already resolved.

    But just as environmental alarmists feel the fact that most environmental trends are positive is a disastrous secret that must be covered up at all costs, the anti-government crowd feels the fact that most environmental regulations are working and reasonably priced poses the same political danger. So the left speaks of the Midwest power plant problem as if it were representative of all industry, while the right speaks of NSR"s regulatory overkill as if it were representative of all anti-pollution programs. Journalists buy into both forms of propaganda because they make for argument and anger, skipping the controversy-deflating complication that both the left and the right are wildly exaggerating the importance of NSR.

    How else to explain the media"s inattention to the statistics that puncture the NSR controversy? According to an analysis by the Clean Air Task Force, a respected environmental group, if the strictest interpretation of NSR were applied to the 51 dirtiest Midwest plants, acid rain emissions would decline by 2.8 million tons per year, while nitrogen oxide emissions would decline by one million tons. That sounds impressive, but weight totals for gases--what most air pollution is--can be deceptive. The figures equate to a 15 percent reduction in total acid rain emissions and a 4 percent cut in total nitrogen oxide emissions. Such reductions would be welcome but hardly decisive. (Acid rain emissions already declined, during the "90s, by almost twice as much as what the strictest interpretation of NSR would produce.)

    The relatively small benefits of potentially cracking down on Midwest plants highlight the media make-believe of those who claim Bush"s decision means "thousands of premature deaths per year that could have been prevented." Public health studies do show that power plant emissions contribute to premature deaths, mainly among the elderly, which is why new emission reductions are needed. But the big totals for premature deaths per year (researchers are currently debating the correct estimate) are the effects from all forms of air pollution, from all sources, not just the effects from the NSR-regulated pollutants in the dirty Midwest power plants. That"s more likely to be in the range of a few hundred per year--important, yes, but in the low ranks of causes of death.

    What about, "Lakes will be destroyed. Forests will be destroyed"? Improbable: Dramatic reductions in acid rain have already led to a comeback of Eastern woodlands. The Brookings Review recently noted, "Appalachian forests, expected to be wiped out by acid rain, are the healthiest they have been since before the industry era." Eastern lakes have shown a slower-than-expected rate of recovery from "acidification," but even there the trends are not negative, only slowly positive. Some have suggested that the White House plan would cause new peril to lakes and forests by creating "hot spots"--local areas where emissions went up even as overall pollution declines. But the EPA already has hot-spot programs, with the clunky names "nonattainment area" and "prevention of significant deterioration," which activate when there is a local pollution increase. These programs are not affected by Bush"s NSR decision; if his action causes a hot spot, one of the other programs will come into force and compel the responsible power plants to stage extra cleanup. Hot-spot programs work: Maps comparing hot spots in 1994 versus 2000 show that nearly all are in decline.

    Then there"s, "Once again, clean air takes a backseat to the polluters...." But average people want the electricity generated by "the polluters," and just last year, during the California power crunch, members of both parties called for increases in generating capacity. Besides, clean air doesn"t take a backseat under the Bush interpretation. What the White House proposed is to simplify NSR to allow plant managers to install modern, generally cleaner hardware without litigation. Bush has not granted Midwest power plants authority to increase emissions. Under his NSR, facilities would be restricted to an emissions rate that could not exceed the most they had emitted in any two-year period in the last decade. This suggests that the worst-case result of Bush"s action will not be more pollution but merely a slower rate of pollution reduction. At the same time, by lifting the lawsuit threat Bush"s rule increases the chance that Midwest utilities will spend their money on new, high-efficiency, low-emissions hardware, rather than on lawyers.

    Meanwhile, as attention focuses on the Midwest power plant contretemps, the media, enviros, and Democrats continue to say amazingly little about the Bush "Clear Skies" pollution-reduction proposal unveiled last winter. Pundits, newscasts, and newspapers, which have hammered the administration again and again about the Midwest plants, have reported little or nothing about this pollution-reduction plan since it doesn"t follow the doomsday script. When Clear Skies is referenced, the mention is always dismissive--for instance, The New York Times this week editorialized with outrage about NSR, then in passing brushed off Clear Skies because its details aren"t final. The Bush Midwest-plant plan details aren"t final, either.

    The poorly named Clear Skies proposal would use the same types of simple rules that have an excellent track record on reducing acid rain and automobile emissions to bring about in the next decade new reductions of 6.5 million tons of acid rain emissions from generating stations and 2.9 tons of nitrogen oxide pollution--double the acid rain reduction that would occur under the strictest reading of NSR and triple the nitrogen oxide cut. To top it off, the proposal would also govern Midwest power plants, compelling them to join in the larger, national reduction effort even as they are released from NSR lawsuits.

    Today, with almost all environmental trends positive and almost all environmental regulations good for society, precious little conforms to the left"s and the right"s preconceived notions of ecological doomsday versus regulatory nightmare. So both extremes fixate on NSR, a program that should have been put to bed years ago, and ignore a new pollution-reduction idea that promises to be simpler, cheaper, and more effective. Perhaps that"s all we can expect from the Democratic Party"s alarmist faction and the Republican Party"s energy-industry shills. But couldn"t the media, at least, depart from the script and focus on what serves the public interest?

全文共15244字节