Noose tightens around coal power plants

Chicago's Fisk Generating Station. Image by swanksalot via Flickr

The Environmental Protection Agency has agreed to reduce toxic pollution from coal and oil burning power plants by 2011, only 21 years after the law passed directing the agency to do so. And the agreement comes just one day before activists worldwide will target such plants in a coordinated International Day of Climate Action.

The Clean Air Act of 1990 directed EPA to control toxic emissions from power plants by 2002, but the Bush Administration stalled, first asking Congress to withdraw that requirement and then, when that failed, declaring the regulations inappropriate. Environmental and public health groups sued, and today they announced a settlement with EPA.

Older coal and oil plants had escaped regulation until now, reporting their emissions to EPA each year instead of reducing them. For example, the Fisk Generating Station on the South Side of Chicago emits barium, barium compounds, copper compounds, dioxin, dioxin-like compounds, hydrochloric acid, hydrogen fluoride, lead compounds, manganese compounds, mercury compounds, sulfuric acid and vanadium compounds into the environment. The heavier of those compounds often settle in adjacent neighborhoods.

Activists in Chicago will march on Fisk Saturday as part of a worldwide campaign–3,250 events in more than 150 countries–to pressure world leaders to agree to a binding global climate deal in December at the UN Climate Change Conference. The activists plan to send President Obama a message from his hometown that “Chicago wants leaders, not politicians, on climate.” They will focus on greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide, rather than the hazardous pollutants targeted in Friday’s settlement.

Those greenhouse gas emissions are the target of the climate bill currently in the Senate, but they could also become the focus of EPA regulations under a separate provision of the Clean Air Act if Congress fails to act. Despite the activists’ suggestion that Obama has been a politician, rather than a leader, on climate, all three branches of the federal government now have their sights trained on older coal and oil power plants, making the days of those plants’ dirty deeds seem numbered… unless they can stall until another George W. Bush takes office.