Northeast States Urge Coal Controls

Seven Northeastern states urged the federal government Tuesday to toughen emission controls for older, coal-burning power plants, citing a new study that documents damage to forests and lakes from nitrogen pollution.

“This compelling new report illustrates the need to reduce power plant pollution. Now is not the time for the Bush administration to weaken the Clean Air Act,” New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer said.

Spitzer and his counterparts in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont urged Christie Whitman, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, against relaxing pollution controls in a letter Tuesday.

The Bush administration issued rules last year making it easier for industrial plants and refineries to modernize without having to buy expensive pollution controls. The administration is also still seeking changes to what can be considered “routine maintenance, repair and replacement” at aging coal-burning power plants, many of which are in the Midwest, upwind from the Northeast.

The attorneys general cited a study by the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation in New Hampshire, published last week in the journal BioScience. The report found that deep cuts in the nitrogen pollution created by power plants, sewage treatment plants, cars and other sources were needed to improve the Northeast’s air and water.

The study found that tropospheric ozone induced by nitrogen pollution has diminished the growth of Northeast forests, and that nitrogen pollution is to blame for harmful levels of acidity in more than 30% of the lakes in the Adirondacks and at least 10% of those in New England.