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Lethal Loophole: How the ‘Clear Skies’ Bill Allows Oil Refineries and Chemical Plants to Emit More Toxic Air Pollutants
3/1/2005
 lethalloophole.pdf
News Release
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Executive Summary
The Bush administration
has touted its so-called “Clear Skies” bill as a way to clean up power plant
emissions of smog-forming nitrogen oxides, soot-forming sulfur dioxide, and
toxic mercury. In reality, this bill would allow power plants to pollute more
and longer than under the current Clean Air Act. Moreover, a just-discovered
provision in the bill weakens current law for other industries as well, including
pulp and paper mills, oil refineries, and chemical plants, among others. These
industrial units could “opt in” to the bill and “opt out” of existing requirements
to reduce their emissions of dozens of toxic air pollutants that cause cancer,
birth defects, and other serious health problems.
Specifically, the “Clear Skies” bill (S.131) would exempt as many as 58,000
industrial boilers, commercial and institutional boilers, and process heaters
used at industrial facilities such as pulp and paper mills, oil refineries,
and chemical plants from a 2004 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule that
requires these units to reduce their toxic emissions to the maximum extent possible
by 2007. The bill also would exempt these units from other major Clean Air Act
requirements, including New Source Review and visibility protections for national
parks and wilderness areas. Boilers and process heaters emit a wide variety
of toxic air pollutants, depending on the fuel burned, including arsenic, benzene,
chromium, hydrogen chloride, and lead, among others.
EPA has performed no analyses to date on the effects of this loophole on public
health or the environment. As a first step to understand its potential implications,
this report uses EPA data to estimate the number of industrial facilities in
Colorado that could take advantage of the loophole and their annual emissions
of toxic air pollution.
This hidden provision in the “Clear Skies” bill could exempt as many as 220
industrial facilities in Colorado from the Clean Air Act’s mandate of deep reductions
in toxic pollution. The industries covered by the loophole emitted almost 1.6
million pounds of toxic air pollutants into Colorado’s air in 2002. The loophole
would allow these industries to continue to emit harmful chemicals into Colorado’s
air, threatening the health of citizens across the state.
The “Clear Skies” bill has always been a bad deal for Americans and Coloradans
who want to breathe clean air; this hidden loophole for many different industries
makes it even worse.
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