U.S. Court Orders EPA to Curb Midwest Power Plant Emissions

Based on letters written by former President Jimmy Carter’s environmental chief, a federal judge has ordered the Reagan Administration to begin making Midwestern states reduce pollution linked to acid rain in the Northeast and Canada.

Ruling on a suit by seven Northeastern states, U.S. District Judge Norma Johnson late Friday gave the Environmental Protection Agency nine months to order reductions of sulfur dioxide emissions from Midwest power plants.

Although no states were named in the order, the petition on which the suit was based targeted Ohio, West Virginia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee as likely points of origin of the pollution.

President Reagan has opposed new federal controls on sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants, contending that evidence is insufficient to blame them for acid rain damage in the Northeast and Canada.

The Administration also contended that it was not bound by two letters that former EPA Administrator Douglas Costle wrote on Jan. 13, 1981--seven days before Reagan took office--to then-Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie and Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Me.).

The letters concluded that “acid deposition is endangering public welfare in Canada and the United States.”

New York and the six other Northeastern states charged in their suit that Costle’s letters represented a formal government determination, “setting in motion” a process under the Clean Air Act to reduce allowable emissions.

“The fact that Costle memorialized his findings in a letter (rather than in a Federal Register notice) does not defeat their classification as official agency action,” Judge Johnson wrote.

She also rejected Administration contentions that whatever Costle’s actions represented, they were revoked nine months later when his successor, Anne McGill Burford, wrote Ohio’s governor, saying that the Costle letters were “void of legal significance.”

Other states that were plaintiffs in the suit were Maine, Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New Jersey.