Air pollution equipment company suffers under Bush -- oh, the irony

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-na-pollute31aug31,1,3159587.story?coll=la-home-todays-times

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DURHAM, N.C. — Cormetech Inc.'s state-of-the-art manufacturing plant makes big pollution-control devices that clean millions of tons of smog-producing nitrogen oxides from the smoke that billows out of power plants.

But on Friday, like all Fridays these days, most of the factory's machines were still. Since June, the Durham-based company has cut its workforce and production by more than half and shrunk its workweek from seven days to three or four.

Business is very slow for companies like Cormetech. And it is about to get even slower, industry experts say. The Bush administration on Wednesday announced a relaxation of the Clean Air Act's requirement that older facilities install modern pollution-control devices when they modify their plants in ways that significantly increase emissions.
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Just a few years ago, it looked like aggressive enforcement would make all the dirtiest, pre-1970-vintage plants clean up, said Robert McIlvaine, an industry analyst. Starting in 1999, the Clinton administration brought lawsuits against 51 power plants as well as a number of refineries and wood-processing plants.

Some of the biggest polluting utilities had signed agreements in principle in 2000, but after the Bush administration took office and launched its reforms, those potential agreements stalled. A few utilities have reached agreements with the government, but most opted to go to court.

The administration's new policy makes it easier for electric utilities, refineries and manufacturing plants to update or repair their facilities without having to install modern pollution-control devices as part of the process.

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more....

The air is thick with chemical and political crap, thanks to the G.W. Bush administration. And people are out of jobs, to boot.
Who cares if children's asthma rates sky rocket? At least the Bush buddies will have well-lined pockets. You would think these people have no children and no parents. Maybe they don't.

s_m

and the kids will have to buck up and make their own way.

Excuse me, it's my tee time.

Coal plants / The president's favorite polluters

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/4069471.html

Published August 31, 2003

However they may differ about future investments in pollution control, Americans tend to agree that environmental regulation should be fair and effective.

President Bush's decision last week to keep exempting the dirtiest old power plants, oil refineries and factories from clean-air rules is neither of these. Nor is it, White House claims to the contrary, a new and "balanced" approach to environmental protection. It's simply another giveaway to the president's political backers, at the expense of everyone else.

The Clean Air Act of 1970 began a remarkable reversal of practices that were threatening American public health. It was an expensive process, whose costs were widely shared by businesses and their customers: New cars were required to run cleaner. Gasoline was stripped of lead and sulfur. New factories and power plants were fitted with smokestack "scrubbers." More recently, clean-air standards have been applied to lawn mowers, motorboats and, at long last, diesel trucks. Even the modern wood-burning stove comes with a catalytic converter.

A major exception has been the thousands of aging power plants and other industrial polluters that successfully argued they wouldn't be in operation long enough for pollution controls to pay off. They were exempted from the new standards as long as they kept fading into obsolescence; moves to expand or extend their operations in ways that increased emissions, however, would be subject to pollution limits under a process known as "new source review." It was a policy that made sense, and it met the tests of fairness and effectiveness.

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Now the White House proposes to turn their temporary exemption into a permanent one, rewriting the rules on new source review so that any modernization costing less than 20 percent of a plant's replacement value need not be scrutinized for pollution impact. This is a loophole so large that the rest of the rule hardly matters.

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None of this surprises those who remember how this White House, 10 days after Bush took office, invited lobbyists from the coal, oil, electric and nuclear power industries to off-the-record sessions of writing the nation's new energy policy. The result is decision after decision that baldly favor the president's political friends at the expense of all the other Americans who have paid their share to clear the air.

I cannot fathom the mindset that holds monetary gain as the supreme value -- over life itself. And after these corporations are allowed to degrade and destroy the very source of life -- the water, the air, the earth -- what then?

sw