Clean Air Act

Representatives of the state Department of the Environment's Air Management Administration spoke to the Carroll County Chamber of Commerce yesterday about the likely effect of Clean Air Act amendments on small businesses.Although the regulations don't go into effect until 1995, state officials are required by Congress to create a Small Business Technical and Environmental Compliance AssistanceProgram to help businesses meet the act's requirements.The plan for this program must be submitted to the federal Environmental Protection Agency by Nov. 15.Business owners may call the office now for information about complying with regulations that pertain to them.

I couldn't agree more with Rena Steinzor's commentary on air pollution ("Breathing uneasily," Sept. 8). President Obama's decision to reject his own Environmental Protection Agency's recommendation to strengthen air quality standards for ozone is a bad decision for anyone with lung and/orheart disease. Major ground-level ozone sources are motor vehicles, fossil fuel-driven power plants and other industrial sites. If President Obama is not responding to the public health needs of the millions of heart and lung disease sufferers who are affected by ozone pollution, it must be because he is only listening to the cries of the corporate CEOs of the above industries.

Pity the "environmental president." His White House has just argued itself into a position it knows is indefensible. Now the question is how to get back to a reasonable stance without looking like a complete crowd of obfuscators and back-waddlers.In 1988, Candidate George Bush, fresh from his visit to putrid Boston Harbor, pledged to clean up the environment and undercut Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis' chances of overtaking him in the presidential race. Among other things, Mr. Bush promised to remove the congressional logjam on Clean Air Act revisions.

In a decision that outraged public health experts and environmentalists Friday, President Barack Obama announced that he had directed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency not to do anything further to lower smog in the air until 2013 - after he has been reelected (or so he hopes). EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson was about to tighten controls, which are at this moment significantly less protective even than what the Bush administration thought acceptable. But President Obama, apparently anxious to placate relentless critics at the American Petroleum Institute and the Chamber of Commerce, told Ms. Jackson to back off. The business groups could hardly contain their glee, disingenuously describing the president's decision as an "enormous victory for America's job creators.

FIFTY years ago, a dense mixture of fog and smoke settled over Donora, Pa., a gritty steel mill town of 12,300 people situated on the Monongahela River, 28 miles south of Pittsburgh.When rains and wind cleared away the smog five days later, 17 people had died. Four others who had become ill during the pollution siege died within two months. A government study later concluded that 5,910 persons -- nearly half the population -- had been made ill by the smog.Writers described the Donora incident as the Hiroshima of air pollution -- a disaster that first brought smog to national attention.

WASHINGTON -- Prospects for completing a long-sought revision of the Clean Air Act this year rose yesterday when a congressional conference committee broke a logjam and agreed new proposals to enforce tougher auto emission standards and cleaner-burning fuels.Congressional staff members were cautiously optimistic that the breakthrough would speed resolution of the remaining issues. But it seemed no one was willing to predict whether the committee would succeed in finishing the clean air package by Oct. 19, when Congress is scheduled to recess, or whether the conference would decide to return in November to complete its work.

Remember the vapor-recovery gas pump nozzle -- environmentally elegant but awkward to use, and ultimately axed by the General Assembly?Thanks to the Clean Air Act, which passed both House and Senate over the weekend, the accordion-like nozzles are coming to Maryland after years of debate about them -- along with a myriad of other anti-pollution devices and regulations.But environmentalists caution that it will be years before many of the federal act's provisions begin to take effect. Even if President Bush signs the bill as expected this week, most changes will not occur before 1992.

WASHINGTON - The Environmental Protection Agency issued its final rule yesterday to relax a central requirement of the Clean Air Act, and was promptly sued by nine states, including Maryland, that say the change would amount to government approval for Southern and Midwestern plants to pollute their air. "This action by the Bush administration is a betrayal of the right of Americans to breathe clean, healthy air," said Eliot Spitzer, attorney general of...

In a boon for the energy industry and a setback for environmentalists, the Bush administration is expected to announce soon that it is weakening portions of the Clean Air Act, allowing coal-burning power plants to bypass some anti-pollution rules. President Bush has argued that some Clean Air Act rules stifle energy output and do little to protect the environment. That stance has angered environmentalists, but it was mostly forgotten after Sept. 11. Now, riding high on wartime approval ratings, Bush is revisiting some of his more hotly disputed proposals, including the idea of easing some environmental regulations.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to consider a plea to curtail the government's authority to require industries to clean up the nation's air - just one week after agreeing to hear a request to broaden that power. Both sides of the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to enforce the Clean Air Act will be decided in the court term that starts in October. The court said it would hear the two appeals in back-to-back hearings. The court gave no explanation for widening its review of the Clean Air Act, but it appeared that the justices wanted to explore that complex law from end to end. In the past, the court had refused four times to clarify the key parts of the law. Then, last week, it voted to hear an EPA appeal.

The Chesapeake Bay may be a beloved resource, but we have cruelly mistreated the object of our affections. After many years of knowing how urgently we must protect it, the bay is still far from the clean, vital, vibrant watershed it should be. Its poor health reflects a failure by all of us over decades. By relying on a "voluntary" approach in our cleanup efforts, we are nowhere near the goals that were set to restore this national treasure, and nowhere near a healthy bay. It is time for people to demand that their elected representatives act to do something about a dying bay and a region fraught with polluted and degraded streams and rivers.

W hen proposed environmental regulations draw criticism from polluters as too tough and from advocates as not tough enough, it's possible the proverbial "sweet spot" of middle ground has been hit. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's latest plans for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup may be a work in progress, but clearly a measure of progress is involved. That the Chesapeake Bay could use some tough love is not in dispute. Water quality has suffered terribly as the watershed's population has grown.

WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush could be forcing President-elect Barack Obama to act almost immediately to curb global warming, after years of the Bush administration's fighting attempts to crack down on greenhouse gas emissions. In its final weeks, the Bush administration has moved to close what it calls "back doors" to regulating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It barred the Environmental Protection Agency from considering the effects of global warming on protected species.

Nearly four decades late, a Midwest utility company that's been spewing dangerous pollutants toward Maryland and other downwind states - sickening humans, poisoning national parks and speeding the demise of the Chesapeake Bay - has agreed to clean up its act and make restitution. Celebrations of the landmark $4.6 billion settlement by Ohio-based American Electric Power announced yesterday have to be tempered, though, by lament that it was so long in coming, and that so much irreparable damage was done during the years of dodge and stall encouraged by President Bush.

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. said yesterday that the state plans to impose rules that will compel coal-fired power plants to reduce mercury air pollution by 70 percent within five years - more quickly than required by the Bush administration. "This rule will have a profound impact on preventing ... all sorts of respiratory illnesses as a result of air pollution," the governor told a classroom of students at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda. "It's an aggressive program, an aggressive regulation."

THIS MAY not be much consolation, but however sooty and smoggy the air gets this summer, just know it was spared this week from getting worse - and might even be cleaned up a bit. A Senate committee on Wednesday dealt what may be a lethal blow to President Bush's attempt to loosen and delay pollution-reduction requirements in the Clean Air Act just before the Environmental Protection Agency imposed new curbs yesterday on the coal-fired power plants that...

A Washington-based environmental group has threatened to go to court to force smog reductions in the Baltimore area, where controversy over motor vehicle emissions tests has slowed efforts to improve summer air quality.The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, saying the smog cleanup nationwide has stalled, notified the Environmental Protection Agency Tuesday that it would sue the federal agency in 60 days for failing to enforce the federal Clean Air Act in the Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia metropolitan areas.

Baltimore joined a dozen states and 19 environmental groups yesterday in a lawsuit accusing the Environmental Protection Agency of poorly enforcing the Clean Air Act. The action, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, seeks an order requiring the EPA to tighten standards for carbon dioxide emissions from cars, trucks, power plants and other industries. EPA officials announced Aug. 28 that they lacked authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act. But environmental groups said yesterday that the EPA is ducking its responsibility to control a major cause of global warming.

IF CLEANER AIR is the objective, Congress would make more progress doing nothing than by enacting President Bush's "Clear Skies" proposal, according to state and local air-quality regulators. The group's recommendation to the Senate that it ditch Mr. Bush's proposal in favor of existing Clean Air Act requirements was not only in conflict with but potentially embarrassing to the administration and Republican leaders of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Thus, Committee Chairman James M. Inhofe's request a few days later for financial and tax information from the State and Territorial Air Pollution Program Administrators and the related Association of Local Air Pollution Control Officials (STAPPA/ALAPCO)