The long-term health of national parks and wilderness areas across the eastern U.S. is threatened by a proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that would exempt hundreds of highly polluting, antiquated coal-fired power plants from longstanding air pollution clean-up requirements.
Thirty five years ago -- in the 1977 Clean Air Act -- Congress mandated that these outdated coal plants install the "Best Available Retrofit Technology" (BART) to protect places like Great Smoky Mountains, Voyageurs, Everglades, and Acadia national parks from polluted haze. EPA ignored this mandate for decades, until finally forced by public pressure and litigation to enforce the law.
Now, on the eve of these dirty coal plants finally being forced to clean up their act, EPA wants to give many of them a reprieve from BART requirements, proposing that a regional emissions "trading" program, that in some cases will mean little or no actual cleanup, should be allowed to replace concrete, plant specific pollution reductions.
