Today, the EPA announced national standards governing coal waste from coal-fired power plants, also known as coal ash. The rule does not treat coal ash as a hazardous material, but as household garbage.
CPR President and University of Maryland law professor Rena Steinzor reacted to the classification:
It's bitterly disappointing that the electric utility industry, which earns profits hand over fist, has succeeded in bamboozling the White House to gut this rule. Originally designed by EPA to prevent fatalities, injuries, and grave long-term damage to the public's health, the rule was caught in the cross hairs of naysaying economists on the President's staff, who invented the misguided and subversive notion that if coal ash dumps were cleaned up, coal ash could not be recycled. In fact, a strong rule that makes it more expensive to dispose of coal ash could only result in more of it being recycled, especially because EPA never proposed to place any restrictions on recycling.
Coal-fired power plants produce an astounding 100 million tons of coal ash annually. For decades, utilities dumped this enormous quantity of waste into pits in the ground, where rain turned the ash into inky sludge. Unwilling to face the growing risk posed by the dumps, the companies kept shoring up the fragile walls of such dumps with the functional equivalent of chewing gum and spit. As smokestack scrubbers were installed to keep toxic metals like mercury and arsenic out of the air, these pollutants did not disappear, but instead fell down the stack into the ash, converting it into even more dangerous waste. Two recent spills--from a Duke Energy site in North Carolina and from a Tennessee Valley Authority site in Kingston, Tennessee--should have been the only wake-up call we needed to compel the companies to rebuild these sites before people are killed by spills and drinking water is ruined by leaks out of the bottom of the dumps.
Instead, the White House shut down a strong EPA rule and insisted on the pitifully weak alternative issued today, which treats coal ash as if it was household garbage and leaves it up to the tender mercies of state regulators to chase around after utility executives who have only to call their political bosses to shut down any further controls.
When--not if--the next spill happens, the White House will share the blame. We can only pray that no one is caught in the path of a river of sludge.
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Erin Kesler | December 19, 2014
Today, the EPA announced national standards governing coal waste from coal-fired power plants, also known as coal ash. The rule does not treat coal ash as a hazardous material, but as household garbage. CPR President and University of Maryland law professor Rena Steinzor reacted to the classification: It’s bitterly disappointing that the electric utility industry, which earns profits hand over fist, has succeeded […]
Anne Havemann | December 18, 2014
The main tool available to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to limit the amount of pollution discharged into the nation’s waterways is a system of permits issued to polluters that restricts how much they may discharge. This permitting scheme, the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), requires permittees to monitor their operations and report back […]
Rena Steinzor | December 17, 2014
CPR President Rena Steinzor issued the following statement in response to today’s announcement that a grand jury had indicted owners and managers of Freedom Industries in connection with the massive leak of 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol (MHCM) that fouled the Elk River and triggered a drinking water ban for 300,000 residents earlier this year: Booth Goodwin continues to […]
Matt Shudtz | December 17, 2014
Today, Nebraska Appleseed, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and several allied organizations sent a letter to OSHA requesting a response to their petition for a rulemaking on work speed in poultry and meatpacking plants. The groups originally submitted the petition to OSHA over a year ago, and it’s been radio silence ever since. Meanwhile, tens […]
Matt Shudtz | December 16, 2014
When 29 miners died at Upper Big Branch or 11 workers died on the Deepwater Horizon, when 64 people died from tainted steroids, or when hundreds got Salmonella poisoning from peanut butter, did you ask yourself, ‘Why not send the people responsible to jail?’ You’re not the only one. In her new book, Why Not […]
Rena Steinzor | December 15, 2014
We’ll soon learn the results of White House deliberations over EPA’s long-delayed coal ash rule, one of the Essential 13 regulatory initiatives we’ve called upon President Barack Obama to complete before he leaves office. Under the terms of a consent decree, EPA is required to issue its new rule by Friday, December 19. As glad […]
Anne Havemann | December 12, 2014
Under an Obama Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency will strictly monitor and regulate pollution from large industrial animal farms, with fines for those who violate tough air and water quality standards. —Sen. Barack Obama, 2008 The animal farms to which then-candidate Obama was referring are known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), and they house […]
Erin Kesler | December 10, 2014
Contact: Erin Kesler Email: ekesler@progressivereform.org Telephone: (202) 747-0698 X4 What: CPR and the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law will host a luncheon and Q&A session with MD Attorney General-elect Brian Frosh on the state of environmental enforcement […]
Erin Kesler | December 8, 2014
Recent stories about “dead zones” in the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay are a reminder that despite progress on some water pollution fronts, we still have a serious problem to address. One politically popular approach to addressing the problem is a market-based solution, in which hard-to-regulate “non-point” pollution sources (farming, run-off, other sources […]