Clean Air Act

Residents of Baltimore City and poorer suburbs may joke about the rarefied air of affluent Howard County, but Howard County Executive Charles I. Ecker would like to make an issue of it.Mr. Ecker complained to Maryland Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski that Howard County shouldn't have been placed in the Baltimore metropolitan region under the federal Clean Air Act standards. He contended that Howard should be lumped instead with Washington, where a lack of heavy industry has contributed to better air quality.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has dropped enforcement actions against dozens of coal-fired power plants that were under investigation for violating the Clean Air Act and allegedly spewing thousands of tons of illegal pollution into the air, officials from the Environmental Protection Agency said yesterday. The Bush administration previously had said it would vigorously pursue the enforcement actions, which were launched by the Clinton administration. However, the Bush administration recently eased a provision of the Clean Air Act that requires companies to install modern pollution controls when they build new plants or expand or modernize old ones.

MARYLAND AND 10 of its Northeast neighbors are beginning 2004 with an important victory in their drive to stop the Bush administration from blowing new holes in the Clean Air Act. A three-judge federal appeals panel issued an injunction last week blocking the weakened rules proposed by Mr. Bush from taking effect until a hearing on the issue can be conducted. The injunction is a signal that the court believes there is at least a reasonable prospect that the Bush rules will be struck down permanently.

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.

Yielding to an outcry from Baltimore-area employers, Maryland officials said yesterday they would seek to exempt the city and its suburbs from federally mandated curbs on commuters driving to work alone.Gov. William Donald Schaefer told the region's local elected leaders yesterday in a closed meeting in Baltimore that he feared the area would lose businesses to nearby Washington and its suburbs because of commuting regulations required by the federal Clean Air Act."The governor said he doesn't want to pit one area against another," Page W. Boinest, his press secretary, said after the meeting.

The Maryland General Assembly once again finds itself choosing between public health and the special interests of the automobile and oil industries.Automobile and oil companies habitually invest first in highly-paid lobbyists to block environmental action by the government. Their approach is based on the shameless use of hyperbole, inaccuracy and exaggeration.As far back as 1970, Lee Iacocca claimed that federal clean air legislation ''could prevent continued production of automobiles'' and that it posed ''a threat to the entire American economy and to every person in America.

Sin in the suitesGo, thou, and sin no more, a leading turnaround and management consulting firm tells managers.Morris Anderson & Associates Ltd., the company with the inexplicable dot in its name, has identified what it calls the Five Deadly Sins of Management (no, strange typography is not one of them). According to the company, these are the mistakes managers keep making over and over again as their organizations go down the tubes.Reflect, Morris Anderson says, on whether you are guilty of any of these sins:1.

Finally, President Bush has quietly junked a long-standing Reagan administration policy of stonewalling Canadian complaints on acid rain. It was nearly overlooked in the rush of news about the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war, but on March 13 Mr. Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney signed a new agreement to fight cross-border pollution.Canada has complained repeatedly that acid rain, most of it from the United States, was jeopardizing aquatic life in as many as 14,000 lakes. Environmentalists in New York state and New England, for their part, have long argued that Canadian industry, while smaller in scope than in the U.S., causes serious acid-rain problems there.

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration issued a regulation yesterday that will give manufacturers broad authority to substantially increase the amount of hazardous pollutants they pour into the atmosphere beginning in the mid-1990s.The Environmental Protection Agency reluctantly issued the new rule, which had been championed by the President's Council on Competitiveness, a Cabinet group headed by Vice President Dan Quayle. The rule will be central to a system of pollution permits that will be established over the next 10 years under the Clean Air Act of 1990.

Traffic generated by a new Redskins stadium in Laurel could push pollution levels in the Baltimore-Washington region even closer to the point where extreme measures such as banning outdoor barbecues and power lawn mowers would be necessary.Or it might have only a minimal effect on regional air quality. It all depends on whom you ask.Questions about the effect the proposed 78,600-seat stadium next to Laurel Race Course will have on regional air quality have become part of the environmental debate over the stadium.