Without any last-minute meddling by the White House, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last week published a long-awaited final rule strictly limiting how much mercury, arsenic, hydrochloric acid and other deadly toxins coal-fired and oil-fired power plants can spew into the air.
The rule will save America billions more dollars in health care costs than industry will pay to comply with it, to say nothing of the suffering it will spare children, adults and families by reducing the avoidable deaths, developmental disabilities and disease caused or worsened by exposure to the plants' poisons.
The utility, coal, oil and chemical industries waged a long and brutal fight against the anti-pollution rule, which took more than 20 years to enact. Their tactics included warnings of huge costs, skyrocketing electricity rates, massive job losses and even possible regional blackouts, none of which were justified by objective data analyses.
Even so, that strategy bore fruit earlier this year when President Barack Obama canceled an EPA rule that would have tightened allowable emissions of substances that produce the deadly pollutant ozone. Instead, he put off consideration of the rule until 2013 at the earliest.
But when it came to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule, as it's officially called, the scare tactics didn't work. The president endorsed the EPA's action as "a major step forward" in the protection of public health and the environment.
More than half of existing power plants already meet the standards with widely available technology. Those that don't will have three years (and up to five years, if necessary) to come into compliance.
Some older plants — built a half-century ago or more — may have to shut down because it is impractical to retrofit them with the necessary pollution-control systems. But many of those plants are at or near the end of their functional life cycles anyway and may well have ceased operations even without the new rules.
The generating capacity of some other coal-fired plants may be replaced with natural gas units that are cleaner and more economical than those that burn coal.
According to a recent survey by the Associated Press, 32 power-generating units out of approximately 1,400 in the United States will have to close by 2014 or 2015 because they won't meet the MATS rule and the EPA's new Cross-State Air Pollution rule, which begins phasing in Jan. 1. Another 36 units might have to close, the AP reported. The cross-state rule regulates emissions of sulfur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen that cross state lines and pollute areas downwind from power plants. It affects generating units in 28 states east of the Rocky Mountains.
When Congress passed the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, coal-fired power plants were exempted from standards that applied to other kinds of polluters. The law required a lengthy process that was often delayed to determine if power-plant pollution should be regulated at all.
As the process inched ahead, ordinary Americans, businesses that insured their workers and government programs bore the cost of the health damage caused by the toxic substances the plants pumped into the air.
Finally, after more than two decades, the cost of controlling those pollutants is shifting, as it should, to the polluters.
