The EPA issued its long-awaited cooling water rule yesterday and the score appears to be: Industry – home run; Fish – zero. Which is to say, it’s bad news not just for the fish but also for all of us who depend on the health of our aquatic ecosystems – which is to say, everyone.
This is the rule that governs the design standards for the massive cooling water intakes at power plants and other large industrial facilities that withdraw billions of gallons of water a day from our rivers, lakes and estuaries. In the process, they kill billions of fish and other aquatic organisms. Congress was aware of this problem when it passed the Clean Water Act in 1972 and so included language directing the EPA to require those structures to “reflect the best technology available BTA for minimizing adverse environmental impact.”
When EPA finally got around to issuing regulations implementing this provision in back in 2001, it started with new power plants, concluding that the “best technology available” was a system called “closed cycle cooling,” which recirculates the cooling water. In this way, it dramatically reduces the amount of water withdrawn through intake structures when compared to the standard “once-through” system and significantly reduces the harm to fish (by up to 98%).
But the rule issued yesterday, for existing facilities, stops far short of that. It doesn’t actually require facilities to install any particular technology at all. Instead, it gives them a whole list of options to choose from, one of which is basically, to convince your state agency that what you’re doing is good enough. This not all that different from the old system, under which EPA basically punted these decisions to the states because they hadn’t gotten around to issuing a national rule yet. That’s the system that gave us the status quo: lax standards and lots of dead fish.
In fact, there’s one part of the rule that let’s industry wiggle out of installing protections for fish by convincing state permit writers that “the social costs are not justified by the social benefits.” But that’s a standard that’s pretty much stacked against the fish. Costs to industry of installing new technologies, after all, are easy to measure in dollar terms. But what’s the dollar value of preserving a healthy aquatic ecosystem, or preventing the massacre of a population of striped bass? Even EPA, with all its resources and after years of trying, was not able to quantify the vast majority of the benefits of the rule. So how cash-strapped state agencies will be able to do what the EPA couldn’t is not clear.
Recognizing the difficulty of conducting formal cost-benefit analysis in this context, EPA had initially proposed a much looser standard for the states, allowing them to “reject an otherwise available technology . . . unless the social costs of compliance are wholly disproportionate to the social benefits.” This would have been a much harder standard for industry to meet. But the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) pushed back and made EPA change it to the more formal benefits-must-justify-costs formula.
Showing 2,819 results
Amy Sinden | May 20, 2014
The EPA issued its long-awaited cooling water rule yesterday and the score appears to be: Industry – home run; Fish – zero. Which is to say, it’s bad news not just for the fish but also for all of us who depend on the health of our aquatic ecosystems – which is to say, everyone. […]
James Goodwin | May 20, 2014
Yesterday, CPR Member Scholars sent a letter to House Representatives about their concerns with Section 212 of H.R. 4413, the Consumer Protection and End-User Relief Act. This provision would add a new Section 24 to the Commodity Exchange Act, establishing specific requirements for judicial review of rules adopted by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). […]
Erin Kesler | May 19, 2014
Today, the Seattle Times published an op-ed by CPR scholar and University of Seattle law professor Catherine O’Neill with University of Washington professor and public health officer Frank James entitled, “Protect water and health by updating state’s fish-consumption rate.” According to the piece: GOV. Jay Inslee is currently considering how much fish Washingtonians may safely consume […]
Erin Kesler | May 16, 2014
Center for Progressive Reform Scholar Sidney Shapiro and Asbestos Disease Awareness Association President Linda Reinstein published a piece in Mint Press News on toxic chemical reform legislation. They note: Imagine a chemical that every public health organization in the United States and around the world knows to cause cancer and a host of other illnesses. You might […]
Matt Shudtz | May 8, 2014
The National Academies’ National Research Council released its long-awaited report on IRIS this week, and the results are good for EPA. The report praises the IRIS program and its leadership, including Drs. Olden and Cogliano, for making great strides to improve how IRIS assessments are developed. To get a real appreciation for how positive this […]
Anne Havemann | May 8, 2014
Air pollution is a complex problem. For one, it does not adhere to state boundaries; a smokestack in one state can contribute to pollution problems in another, even a downwind state hundreds of miles away. What’s more, air pollution’s impacts are not confined to just the air. What goes up must come down, and air pollutants […]
Frank Ackerman | May 6, 2014
Frank Ackerman is the coauthor, with Joseph Daniel, of (Mis)understanding Climate Policy: The role of economic modeling, prepared for Friends of the Earth (England, Wales & Northern Ireland) and WWF-UK. Under the Climate Change Act 2008, the UK government sets “legally binding” carbon budgets, which cap the country’s total emissions for five-year periods. The size of […]
William Andreen | May 1, 2014
On April 21, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers published a proposed rulemaking to clarify the jurisdictional reach of the protections afforded by the Clean Water Act of 1972. The Clean Water Act is the foundation of our nation’s effort to restore and maintain the biological, chemical, and physical […]
Erin Kesler | April 29, 2014
The Supreme Court today upheld, by a 6-2 vote, the EPA’s cross-state air pollution rule. Below are reactions from Center for Progressive Reform scholars Thomas O. McGarity and Victor Flatt. According to McGarity: After two decade’s worth of litigation, the Supreme Court has finally held that EPA may require polluters in one state to protect […]