Bush Administration Touts Agreements to Reduce Pollution
Praising the advantages of an environmental law that it has criticized, the Bush administration announced agreements Wednesday with Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Alcoa Inc. to reduce air pollution in 16 states.
The settlements under the “new source review” provisions of the Clean Air Act will result in nearly $680 million in spending to reduce about 130,000 tons of air pollution a year, Environmental Protection Agency and Justice Department officials said.
“I’m willing to admit that this has been a very good tool,” EPA chief Christie Whitman said of those provisions, which her agency changed last year. “But it’s not the best we can do.”
Whitman and Assistant Atty. Gen. Tom Sansonetti emphasized that they will strongly pursue cases such as these even as the administration seeks further changes in the law.
ADM, of Decatur, Ill., the nation’s biggest ethanol producer, agreed to spend about $350.9 million to settle charges that it failed to accurately count emissions and that it expanded corn and oilseed processing facilities without installing proper pollution controls.
The settlement filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois includes $213 million for new pollution controls over the next decade at 52 plants in 16 states.
Those states are Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.
The settlement also includes $127 million to change the way ADM processes corn and oilseeds and to conduct environmental audits at all its facilities. An additional $6.3 million will be spent to retrofit diesel engines in school buses and $4.6 million will go to a civil penalty.
Sansonetti said the case builds on last year’s settlement with 12 ethanol plants in Minnesota, the first time the federal government reached agreements mandating cuts in air pollution from manufacturers of corn-based ethanol, an additive in gasoline.
Alcoa Inc. of Pittsburgh, the world’s largest aluminum producer, cast doubt on the $334.75-million settlement figure provided by the government. The Alcoa settlement -- which grew from a citizen group’s complaint that its Rockdale, Texas, power plant improperly made changes that increased pollution -- was filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas.
Alcoa spokesman Kevin Lowery said it might be cheaper to close that coal-fired power plant and get energy elsewhere for its aluminum smelting facility there rather than spend the $330 million the government estimated it would cost to install new boilers.
But the company will spend $2.5 million for conservation easements around the plant and $750,000 to retrofit school buses in Austin, Texas; it also will pay a $1.5-million civil penalty.
Whitman said the agreements would reduce by 68,000 tons a year from Alcoa and by 63,000 tons a year from ADM emissions of air pollutants such as smog-causing nitrogen oxides and acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide. Sansonetti called it the first settlement of its kind involving the grain and oilseed processing industry.
ADM spokeswoman Karla Miller said the company’s new practices “will set the standard for our industry.”
The new source review provisions of the Clean Air Act date to 1977 and affect the way older industrial plants have to deal with air pollution when they expand, make major repairs or modify operations to increase efficiency.
The Bush administration issued rules last year making it easier for industrial plants and refineries to modernize without having to buy expensive pollution controls, and it is still seeking changes to what can be considered “routine maintenance, repair and replacement” at aging coal-burning power plants.
Administration officials say their new approach removes barriers to production and innovation, but opponents argue it undermines the Clean Air Act and is a giveaway to industry, which lobbied heavily for easing the rules.
