Oh say can you see?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24658362

By Juliet Eilperin

updated 1 hour, 33 minutes ago
The Bush administration is on the verge of implementing new air quality
rules that will make it easier to build power plants near national parks and
wilderness areas, according to rank-and-file agency scientists and park
managers who oppose the plan.

The new regulations, which are likely to be finalized this summer, rewrite a
provision of the Clean Air Act that applies to "Class 1 areas," federal
lands that currently have the highest level of protection under the law.
Opponents predict the changes will worsen visibility at many of the nation's
most prized tourist destinations, including Virginia's Shenandoah,
Colorado's Mesa Verde and North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt national parks.

Nearly a year ago, with little fanfare, the Environmental Protection Agency
proposed changing the way the government measures air pollution near Class 1
areas on the grounds that the nation needed a more uniform way of regulating
emissions near protected areas. The agency closed the comment period in
April and has indicated it is not making significant changes to the draft
rule, despite objections by EPA staff members.

Jeffrey R. Holmstead, who now heads the environmental strategies group at
the law firm Bracewelll & Giuliani, helped initiate the rule change while
heading the EPA's air and radiation office. He said agency officials became
concerned that the EPA's scientific staff was taking "the most conservative
approach" in predicting how much pollution new power plants would produce.

"The question from a policy perspective was: Do you need to have models
based on the absolute worst-case conditions that were unlikely to ever occur
in the real world?" Holmstead said in an interview Thursday. "This has to do
with what [modeling] assumptions you're required to do. This is really a
legal issue and a policy issue."

Changing how pollution is monitored
The initiative is the latest in a series of administration efforts going
back to 2003 to weaken air quality protections at national parks, including
failed moves to prohibit federal land managers from commenting on permits
for new pollution sources more than 31 miles away from their areas and to
protect air resources only for parks that are big and diverse enough to
"represent complete ecosystems."

For 30 years, regulators have measured pollution levels in the parks, over
both three-hour and 24-hour increments, to capture the spikes in emissions
that occur during periods of peak energy demand. The new rule would average
the levels over a year so that spikes in pollution levels would not violate
the law.

A slew of National Park Service and EPA officials have challenged the rule
change, arguing that it will worsen visibility in already-impaired areas,
according to internal documents obtained by the House Committee on Oversight
and Government Reform.

In one set of comments, the EPA's regional computer modeling staff wrote
that the proposal "would allow for significant degradation" of the parks'
air quality. An e-mail from National Park Service staff called aspects of
the plan "bad public policy" that would "make it much easier to build power
plants" near Class 1 areas, which include some Fish and Wildlife
Service-protected land.

When the committee chairman, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), asked the EPA
whether the rule would facilitate construction of more power plants near
protected areas, Robert J. Meyers, principal deputy assistant administrator
for the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, replied in an April 24 letter
that this was not the intention of the rule but that he could not rule it
out.

"We developed this proposal based on the need to clarify how increment
consumption must be addressed, and not whether or not it would be easier to
build power plants," Meyers wrote. "In the absence of any data or evidence
provided by the National Park Service, we are unable to conclusively confirm
or deny their suggestion."



Group: Rule would pave way for coal plants
On Thursday, the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group,
issued a report estimating that the rule would ease the way for the
construction of 33 new coal-fired power plants within 186 miles of 10
national parks. In each of the next 50 years, the report concludes, the new
plants would emit a total of 122 million tons of carbon dioxide, 79,000 tons
of sulfur dioxide, 52,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, and 4,000 pounds of toxic
mercury into the air over and around the Great Smoky Mountains, Zion and
eight other national parks.

"It's like if you're pulled over by a cop for going 75 miles per hour in a
55 miles-per-hour zone, and you say, 'If you look at how I've driven all
year, I've averaged 55 miles per hour,' " said Mark Wenzler, director of the
National Parks Conservation Association's clean-air programs. "It allows you
to vastly underestimate the impact of these emissions."

Don Shepherd, an environmental engineer at the Park Service's air resources
division in Denver, said of the new rule, "I don't know of anyone at our
level, who deals with this day to day, that likes it or thinks it's going to
make sense.

"We really want to have clean air at national parks all the time, and not
just at average times," Shepherd said in a telephone interview. "All of our
national parks have impaired visibility. . . . It would really be a setback
in trying to make progress."

Air-quality problems at parks
While the government has made progress in reducing haze-producing sulfur
dioxide and nitrogen oxide pollution in recent decades, many of the nation's
best-known parks still have poor visibility and air quality.

In October, the Park Service published a 10-year analysis of air quality
trends that found that sulfate concentrations in precipitation have declined
on the East Coast because of the federal acid rain program, but that Western
parks have not experienced similar reductions. The concentrations of ozone
smog over an eight-hour period are worsening across almost all of the
interior West, including "some of the most remote places in the nation,"
said Vicki Patton, deputy general counsel for the Environmental Defense
Fund.

Jim Renfro, an air resources specialist at Great Smoky Mountains National
Park, said the park is suffering from a host of pollution problems,
including smog and sulfur and nitrogen deposition. Visibility on summer days
is 15 miles, rather than the nearly 80 it used to be, and the park now does
not meet federal smog standards.

"There are some days when it's unhealthy to breathe at the park, so that's a
major concern. People come here to get away, and they can't believe that
sometimes they're better off where they came from," Renfro said. "We've got
a long way to go."

Power plant emissions are also affecting vegetation and wildlife, making
streams in Shenandoah more acidic and stripping nutrients out of the soil
that sustains spruce firs at the Great Smoky Mountains' higher elevations.
The Great Smokies have the highest levels of acid deposition of any
monitored area in North America.

Georgia Murray, a staff scientist at the Appalachian Mountain Club, an
outdoor recreation and advocacy group, said emissions will have to drop
significantly for ecosystems on the East Coast to improve. "It's the type of
pollution that takes years to recover from," she said.

Holmstead, however, said the administration's Clean Air Interstate Rule,
implemented in 2005, will ultimately reduce pollution nationwide.

"What you want to do is reduce the total amount that comes out of these
power plants," Holmstead said. "There's no Class 1 area in the country that
is only affected by a nearby power plant."


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