Cleaner States Exempted in Senate Acid Rain Plan

Clean air advocates in the Senate announced a compromise Friday designed to bring Congress one step closer to an agreement on controlling acid rain by proposing to exempt states that already have installed equipment to reduce power plant emissions.

Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) outlined the agreement at a news conference called to preview legislation they plan to introduce next week as part of congressional debate on President Bush’s clean air bill.

Acid rain is formed when airborne sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides are transformed into sulfuric and nitric acids. After being carried back to earth by rain or snow, the pollutants are associated with destruction of marine life and damage to forests and buildings.

The Mitchell-Baucus proposal retains the main acid rain provisions of the President’s bill, which would require public utilities to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants by 10 million tons by the year 2000. Both measures propose a subsequent limit on the growth of sulfur dioxide emissions.

Unlike the Bush bill, however, the Mitchell-Baucus measure would exempt states that have already installed pollution-control equipment on more than half of their coal-fired power plants from the need to make further reductions until the year 2000. The affected states are Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

The compromise proposal would also exempt new plants that burn “clean” or low-sulfur coal from mandatory installation of expensive pollution control devices known as scrubbers.

Both exemptions address concerns raised by Montana and other “clean coal” Western states about the added cost that they would bear to help reduce sulfur dioxide emissions nationwide.

Baucus called the agreement “a real breakthrough” that should accelerate passage of a clean air bill through Congress.

Opposition is still expected from Midwestern states that burn high-sulfur coal and that would bear most of the cost of reducing sulfur dioxide emissions. But Mitchell, a long-standing advocate of acid rain legislation in the Senate, predicted that “some form of cost-sharing” could be negotiated “to accommodate the interests of the Midwestern states.”

The compromise was hailed by environmentalists, who said a consensus on acid rain legislation would remove one of the most contentious issues that has blocked passage of clean air legislation in the past.

“The prospect of getting strong bipartisan legislation on clean air is greatly enhanced by this step,” said A. Blakeman Early, a Washington representative of the Sierra Club. “It’s a major step forward, in our opinion.”

The Bush clean air bill, which represents the first comprehensive attempt in more than a decade to revise the Clean Air Act of 1970, is undergoing an intensive debate on Capitol Hill. Several bills and amendments are being proposed by clean air advocates seeking to strengthen the measure, which is designed to achieve major reductions in smog, acid rain and toxic air pollutants by the end of the century.

Environmentalists won a test victory in the House on Wednesday, when an Energy and Commerce subcommittee voted unanimously to delete a provision from the Bush bill that would have allowed auto makers to satisfy tailpipe emission standards by averaging the emission levels of all the cars they produced.