EPA Backed Off 'Hazardous' Label for Coal Ash After White House Review - NYTimes.com
In spite of all the Baloney Sandwiches being hurled about in the press, concerning President Obama's supposed "War On Coal", all of them no doubt gleefully slathered with mayonnaise by his chief detractors in the Republican Party, as seen for one example, in:
West Virginia Coal Association | A Vendetta Against Coal | Latest; "A Vendetta Against Coal; By John E. Sununu; Who Says President Obama doesn’t have an energy policy? Last month it was boldly on display as the Environmental Protection Agency published rules restricting CO2 emissions for power plants";
never mind that the author, John E. Sununu, as can be learned via:
John E. Sununu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia;
"(while) a US Congressman ... had 'one of the House's most conservative voting records' - (and opposed) increased minimum wages"; and: "(while) a US Senator ... was the lead Republican co-sponsor of the Clean Air Planning Act of 2007 which sought to address air quality and climate change by establishing a schedule to reduce harmful emissions from power plants - in particular, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides - as well as decrease carbon dioxide emissions through a cap-and-trade system (and, which) legislation, which was never enacted, also addressed mercury pollution, calling for a 90% reduction in emissions of the chemical by 2015. He also supported the bipartisan Clean Energy Stimulus Act of 2008 that provides tax incentives for the development of clean and renewable energy sources".
More concerning Obama's detractors and rivals comes from the Republican land of Nixon and Reagan, and loads of environmental consciousness, where you wouldn't expect them to be so forthcoming, as in:
Romney accuses Obama of 'waging a war on coal' - Los Angeles Times; wherein we learn that Mitt Romney, "as governor of Massachusetts ... cracked down on polluting coal plants, and was poised to take part in a regional cap-and-trade system, but withdrew about the time he decided to run for president in the 2008 campaign; and, that:
“President Obama has increased investments in the research and development of clean-coal technology, and employment in the mining industry hit a 15-year high in 2011,” said Obama spokeswoman Lis Smith. “This stands in stark contrast to Mitt Romney, who, as governor of Massachusetts, spoke out against coal jobs and said that a coal-fired plant ‘kills people.’ This is just another issue where Mitt Romney is not being honest with the American people.'"
Concerning the quote attributed to Romney, albeit by an Obama partisan, see, for independent confirmation:
Romney in 2003: "I Will Not Create Jobs That Kill People" - YouTube; "2/6/03: Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney attacks the Salem coal plant for killing people, saying it would be cleaned up by 2004. That has not happened".
So muddled is the issue, that, sagely, as seen in:
Coal Miners’ Union Sits Out Presidential Race - Amy Harder - NationalJournal.com; "Fairmont, WV; After giving then-Sen. Barack Obama a full-throttled endorsement in the 2008 presidential election, the United Mine Workers of America has decided not to endorse either Obama or the presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, in 2012. 'As of right now, we’ve elected to stay out of this election,” said Mike Caputo, a UMWA official and a Democratic member of the West Virginia House of Delegates. “Our members right now have indicated to stay out of this race, and that’s why we’ve done that.... I don’t think quite frankly that coalfield folks are crazy about either candidate'";
the United Mine Workers of America, all of whose members that happen to come from underground mines having been trained to sniff out accumulations of the dangerous gas known archaically, but appropriately, as "stink damp", are avoiding the election - - much as they would stay out of a fresh face cut that was making too much noise and raining flakes of roof slate.
The top, as they would say, is "working".
The above-cited "Mike Caputo" is not only a "member of the West Virginia House of Delegates", he is also "a vice president on the UMWA’s International Executive Board" and goes on, as the article states, to point out that "many of the biggest EPA rules, including one finalized last December to control mercury and other air toxic pollution from coal plants, were first enacted under Republican administrations, including President George H.W. Bush".
"'A lot of our members don’t realize that,' Caputo said. 'But whoever is in charge is going to get blamed.'"
Well, if they're going to get the blame, they should get the credit, too.
As UMWA Vice President Caputo notes, "many of the biggest EPA rules" got kicked off "under Republican administrations, including" the Big Oil reign of "President George H.W. Bush".
One of those was a review of the classification of Coal Ash; that is, whether it is or is not hazardous waste.
Up until now, the EPA has seen Coal Ash as a valuable raw material resource, as they themselves state, in:
Frequent Questions Coal Combustion Residuals (CCR) | Industrial Waste | US EPA; "EPA believes there are important benefits to the environment and the economy from the use of coal ash in encapsulated form, such as in wallboard, concrete, roofing materials and bricks, where the coal ash is bound into products. Environmental benefits from these types of uses include greenhouse gas reduction, energy conservation, reduction in land disposal, and reduction in the need to mine/process virgin materials. We have no data showing that encapsulated uses pose a problem for human health or the environment. One of the most widely recognized beneficial applications of coal ash is the use of coal fly ash as a substitute for portland cement in the manufacture of concrete. The use of coal ash increases the durability of concrete and the process generates fewer greenhouse gas emissions. For each ton of fly ash that is substituted for portland cement, approximately one ton of greenhouse emissions are avoided."
Thanks, however, to a review that got kicked off in 2006 - - spurred on later by an inexcusable Ash spill in Tennessee - - as UMWA VP Mike Caputo indicates in general terms, under the reign of George Bush, the EPA was just a few years ago poised to reclassify Coal Ash as "hazardous".
President Obama's White House Office of Management and Budget stopped that from happening; as revealed in excerpts from the initial link in this dispatch:
"'EPA Backed Off 'Hazardous' Label for Coal Ash After White House Review'; by Patrick Reis; Greenwire; Published: May 7, 2010; U.S. EPA's proposed regulation of coal ash as a hazardous waste was changed at the White House to give equal standing to an alternative favored by the coal industry and coal-burning electric utilities.
(There) was just one rule proposal that EPA sent to the White House's Office of Management and Budget last October and that would have labeled coal ash a hazardous waste, documents released yesterday show. EPA said then that compliance with the hazardous-waste regulations would be more expensive but that costs would be outweighed by health and environmental benefits.
EPA wrote then that "maintaining a [nonhazardous] approach would not be protective of human and the environment."
What changed in the six months that the proposal was in OMB's hands?
Says EPA:
Its administrator, Lisa Jackson, changed her mind about the hazardous-waste designation.
"After extensive discussions, the Administrator decided that both the [hazardous and nonhazardous] options merited consideration for addressing the formidable challenge of safely managing coal ash disposal," EPA said in a statement.
In its deliberations on the rule, OMB had more than 40 meetings with stakeholders, 30 with industry groups and at least 12 with environmental and public health groups, according to office's records. OMB declined to comment on the matter, referring questions to EPA.
Proponents of the hazardous designation say Jackson was bullied away from the agency's original proposal by industry lobbyists and OMB economists.
"OMB is substituting its judgment for the judgment of the EPA administrator, and that's not the way this is supposed to work," said Rena Steinzor, president of the Center for Progressive Reform and a professor at the University of Maryland Law School. "Lisa Jackson is accountable for environmental protection and that she could be overruled by a bunch of economists in the basement of the executive office tells us that this process is frighteningly dysfunctional."
Environmentalists have been pressing EPA for the hazardous designation for years, but the campaign gained momentum 16 months ago when a wet storage pond at a Kingston, Tenn., power plant failed, spilling about 1 billion gallons of sludge into surrounding lands and rivers. Even when the ponds do not fail, they can leach toxic concentrations of heavy metals into water supplies, said Lisa Evans, an attorney with the nonprofit Earthjustice.
Under the hazardous option EPA proposed Tuesday, such ponds would be phased out over five years. The nonhazardous alternative would allow new wet storage ponds to be built but require new safety measures and pollution monitoring devices.
Utilities and companies that sell coal ash for recycling as a building material argue that a hazardous designation overstates the health risks from coal ash and would unnecessarily impose new storage costs. They also say it would stigmatize building materials that use recycled coal ash and send more of the waste to landfills.
The changes to EPA's proposal during the OMB review suggest the regulatory-review process worked properly, said Jim Roewer, executive director of the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group.
Both environmental groups and affected business had an opportunity to share their views, Roewer said. The number of meetings with industry groups should not be seen as "undue influence" but rather the result of the high number of companies affected by coal ash rules, he said.
The review process 'does open the opportunity for interested stakeholders to present their views so that EPA or whatever federal agency is developing a rule can get as much information as possible,' Roewer said. 'To say this is a bad thing for public policy seems like a strange argument.'"
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If we might attempt to sum all of that up for you:
The EPA has historically viewed Coal Ash as a raw material resource which we would be far better off utilizing in things like Cement and Concrete - - in which it performs admirably, and in which any supposed toxins would be forever "encapsulated" - - rather than just somehow to disposing of.
That began to change due to a review initiated, apparently, by or at least during the Bush Administration.
The EPA at last came back and proposed reclassifying Coal Ash as "hazardous" waste.
President Obama's administration, his Office of Management and Budget, said "No".
Now, if we don't have that quite right, maybe a member of the Coal Country press corps could behoove themselves to get off their dead cans and do the actual research needed to set the record genuinely straight.
While they're at it, maybe they could make some inquiries into, as seen in:
West Virginia Coal Association | WV Senators Rockefeller and Manchin Support Coal Ash Reuse | Research & Development;
"House Resolution 2273: Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act", "to facilitate recovery and beneficial use ... of materials generated by the combustion of coal and other fossil fuels";
and, the Senate version:
"S1751; Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act";
and, get back to us with some facts. Far past time we finally started to get a few of those.
