Bush Epa Gives Up On Plan To Issue Nsr Rule And Parks Rule Favored By Power Companies

摘要

Delivering a disappointment for electric utilities, the Bush administration last week dismissed plans to issue rules that would have given coal-fired power plants more flexibility to upgrade without having to install expensive pollution control technologies in accordance with the Clean Air Act's new source review requirements. The Environmental Protection Agency also said it would not finalize a rule for modeling emissions near national parks that environmentalists argued would have made it easier to build fossil-fuel power plants in these areas. Air regulation experts said EPA under the Obama administration is not required to act on these proposed rules and it was unlikely that the agency under new leadership would do so. "So this administration's announcement is likely the death knell to both of these actions," said Chet Thompson, a partner at Crowell Moring who served as deputy general counsel and associate deputy general counsel at EPA between 2004 and 2006. "There is nothing that requires [the new] EPA to act on these," he said.