Under Clear Skies

By Molly Ivins, AlterNet. Posted September 19, 2003.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The administration is now in The Full Ostrich on Iraq: Dick Cheney put on a fabulous performance last Sunday on "Meet the Press," in which he insisted everything in Iraq is tickety-boo, right as rain and cheery bye. I haven't heard anyone lie with such gravitas since Henry Kissinger was in office.

But for the complete black-is-white, up-is-down, peace-is-war mode, you have to check out this administration on the environment. I am fascinated by its rank chutzpah. The latest brass-balls moxie episode was President Bush's Monday visit to the Detroit Edison power plant in Monroe, Mich., which he actually touted as a "living example" of why his dandy Clear Skies (gag me) initiative is so good for us all. "You're good stewards of the quality of the air," Bush told the plant's pleased workers.

The Monroe plant is one of the worst polluters in the country: In 2001, it sent 102,700 tons of sulfur dioxide, the leading cause of acid rain, into the atmosphere, along with 45,900 tons of nitrogen oxide, 810 pounds of mercury and 17.6 million tons of carbon dioxide. A study done in 2000 by ABT Associates, which the Environmental Protection Agency has used to measure the health effects of pollution, says the plant annually causes 293 premature deaths, 5,740 asthma attacks and 50,298 lost work days.

Under Clear Skies (these people are going to kill irony), the plant will continue to shed this gentle beneficence on us all for the next 17 years. According to environmental groups, the administration's relaxation of clean air rules, known as the "new source review," will allow the plant to increase its emissions by more than 30,000 tons a year, a 56 percent increase.

Bush told the happy Monrovians, "Lights went out last month -- you know that. It recognizes that we've got an issue with our electricity grid and we need to modernize it. The quicker we put modern equipment into our power plants, the quicker people are going to get more reliable electricity." Asked what Clear Skies (give us a break) had to do with the aged electricity grid, according to The Washington Post, "A senior Bush aide later said that Bush was not asserting that the old clean air rules led to the blackouts. 'We are unable to draw any connection without further study.'" If that wasn't what Bush asserted, then what was he asserting? That guy must have listened to a different speech than the one I did.

Clear Skies (I give up: I refuse to call it that), which has yet to be enacted by Congress, is not to be confused with the "new source review" rules, which the administration has already changed. The Misnomer sets up a system under which dirty plants can buy "pollution credits" from clean plants and keep polluting. New source review is a glitch in the Clean Air Act passed in 1977. The Clean Air Act "grandfathered in" more than 16,000 aging plants and industrial facilities in the happy expectation that they would gradually be in compliance in a few years. The EPA estimates 30,000 Americans a year, 10 times as many were killed on Sept. 11, die each year because the Clean Air standards on coal-fired power plants have not been enforced.

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