Environmental
News
perspective, "you don't want to be sending pollution towards your neighbors." In the mid-1990s, the logjam to design a bilateral agreement to control acid rain was broken when the Canadians agreed to reduce their sulfur dioxide (S02) emissions, added Dan McDermott, director of the OntAIRio campaign, the Sierra Club of Eastern Canada. "The current situation with NO, is essentially the same as it was then with acid rain," said McDermott. "The Canadian [NOJ programs are woefully inadequate." The Ontario province only recently proposed mandatory NO, standards on its coal and oil-generating power plants. A few days after Anderson's announcement, Ontario's Environment Minister Tony Clement released proposed standards to control NO,. The proposal, expected to become final this summer, places an annual emissions cap for NO, of 36,000 metric tons per year beginning in 2001. The proposal is aimed at Ontario Power Generating (OPG), the province's publicly owned electricity company, which provides 90% of the province's electricity. It includes a trading program that will allow OPG to buy NO, emissions from sources in any province or across the U.S.-Canadian border, within the Ontario airshed. But Ontario environmentalists believe the Clement proposal, which they had anticipated, "couldn't be a worse possible outcome," said Jack Gibbons, chair of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, a coalition of citizen groups and municipal utility districts. The proposed standards are a nominal drop from the voluntary cap of 38,000 metric tons, said Gibbons. If finalized, the Ontario proposal will still allow OPG plants to emit twice as much NO, as EPA is asking under the NO, SIP call, said Miller. And the environmentalists doubt that the details of the trading scheme, which has not been worked out, will include an emissions cap for OPG. "We've got absolutely no credibil-
ity going into the discussions with the U.S.; we've not got 'clean hands'; and we've got no ability to ask the U.S. to further reduce their emissions," Gibbons said. Dan Schultz, Clement's press secretary, said Ontario will not impose stricter NO, limits on its utility until EPA's NO, SIP call is implemented. "We want a national standard [in the U.S.] that each state will meet, which would make it much easier for Ontario to decide where to set its standard," he added. Anderson himself has admitted that he needs Clement to set enforceable NO, standards compatible with EPA's before the Ozone Annex can be completed. This gap in compatibility is most
notable in upstate New York, where an air quality monitor sponsored by both countries has shown that NO, emissions are mostly coming from the northeast, or from Ontario, said Miller. However, when measuring NO, emissions across North America, emissions from Michigan and certain midwestern states moving into Canada are much larger than those blowing from Canada into the United States, Miller added. So what can the United States bring to the table? John Bauchman, associate director of the Policy Analysis and Communications Staff in the Office of Air Quality, Planning, and Standards, who is heading the discussions
Pollution Toxic releases rise in Canada Canada's toxic chemical releases jumped by 12.7% in 1997 to 161,876 metric tons, according to the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) issued last December by Environment Canada. Most of the increase is attributable to improved reporting from coal-fired utilities, said Francois Lavallee, NPRI head. Before 1997, most utilities did not measure smokestack emissions of sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, and hydrogen fluoride. Using new information from the U.S. EPA on how to estimate releases from coal-fired utilities, Canada provided the utilities with technical guidance to improve their consistency in reporting these releases, he explained. As a result, reporting of releases from utilities rose to 12,632 metric tons in 1997, up 69% from 1996. Meanwhile, off-site transfers of pollutants for disposal away from the generating facility swelled by 54.7% to 96,341 metric tons. In Ontario, the nation's most heavily industrialized province, off-site transfers increased by 50% from 1994 to 1997, said Mark Winfield, director of research for the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy. If this rise in off-site transfers was simply due to increased production, it would have been matched by the province's gross domestic product (GDP) growth, he said. Because Ontario's GDP grew only one-third as much as the rate of off-site transfers, this indicates that their rise is not due to increased production, but could be caused by "a shell game where pollutant releases are moved to transfers off-site," Winfield said, adding that the trend illustrates the need for a stronger focus on pollution prevention in Canada. Lavallee admitted that the government has no idea why transfers off site have increased so dramatically. Canadian facilities report 1.5 times more off-site pollutant transfers than American companies do, said Erica Phipps, program manager of technical cooperation for the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, the watchdog agency of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Last fall, Phipps's agency released a report comparing toxic chemical releases in the United States and Canada for 1996. It ranked Ontario in second place after Texas for releasing the most toxic chemicals in North America. —JANET PELLEY
1 1 6 A • MARCH 1, 2000 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY / NEWS
