Government▼Watch
An interim report from the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) released on January 14 has renewed debate over President Bush’s plan to revise the Clean Air Act (CAA). Congress requested that the NRC, which is part of the nation’s top scientific advisory group, the National Academy of Sciences, conduct the analysis. The U.S. EPA finalized the highly controversial changes made to the CAA’s New Source Review (NSR) rules in 2002 and 2003. Among other things, Bush’s Clear Skies Initiative proposes to exempt owners of older electric power plants and brand new plants from having to install updated pollution control technology as required under the NSR program, if plant emissions increase after repairs or other maintenance work is done. It replaces several CAA programs with an emissions cap-and-trade program. “It is unlikely that Clear Skies would result in emissions limits at individual sources that are tighter
PHOTODISC
Clarifying the complicated New Source Review
than those achieved when NSR is triggered at the same source,” the NRC wrote in its 160-page preliminary report. “It’s just impossible at this stage to say that Clear Skies would be better, worse, or do nothing for the environment at this point in our work,” cautions Charles Stevens of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, who heads the NRC panel. Yet, state air regulators, environmental groups, and others who strongly oppose Clear Skies breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s simply an uncontested fact
that a cap-and-trade system like that in Clear Skies wouldn’t reduce emissions at individual plants as much as the old NSR would,” says David McIntosh of the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council. EPA officials have defended the NSR revisions and the president’s plan, saying that the trading program will provide facility owners with an incentive to reduce their emissions more than required, which is likely to happen in the first few years. They also criticize the strategy of filing lawsuits against individual utility plants that overlook NSR that was conducted by EPA under the Clinton Administration, saying that Clear Skies would achieve reductions at a wide variety of sources rather than just a few power plants. The NRC panel expects to complete its report this year. A copy of the Interim Report of the Committee on Changes in New Source Review Programs for Stationary Sources of Air Pollution (2005) can be viewed at http://books.nap.edu/ books/0309095786/html/index.html. —CATHERINE M. COONEY
Protecting the blue Danube Officials from Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, and Ukraine signed an agreement last December to coordinate water quality and flood risk management in the Tisza river basin, which is still suffering in the aftermath of a major cyanide spillage five years ago. The Tisza basin management strategy is expected to cover a range of joint activities, such as improving flood management by preventing deforestation and restoring alluvial forests; assessing potential accidental hot spots, particularly mines; and introducing a common water and sediment monitoring system. The ministers from these five countries met as part of the Danube River Protection Convention, an international agreement that became effective in October 1998. Convention participants, representing ministers from 13 countries touching on the Danube river basin, also approved an analysis of the Danube basin known as the Roof Report. The analysis named the Danube’s as the second largest river basin in Europe and revealed that the majority of water bodies in the basin—including the Tisza, one of the Danube’s
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main tributaries—may fail to reach EU water quality standards by the 2015 deadline. About half of the Danube basin is at risk, or possibly at risk, from organic pollution; about half from nutrient pollution; and about 70% from hazardous substances, the analysis shows. The Danube river basin covers 801,463 square kilometers in territories of 18 states. In January 2000, cyanide leaked from a gold mine in Baia Mare, northern Romania, and traveled down the Tisza in Hungary, creating a trail of ecological destruction. According to an assessment by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the Tisza river basin ecosystem is largely recovering, yet more concerted action is needed to help protect communities and wildlife still at risk from floods and industrial pollution. The analysis of the Danube river basin, the WFD Roof Report 2004, can be found at www.icpdr.org/pls/danubis/ danubis_db.dyn_navigator.show. The report Rapid Environmental Assessment of the Tisza River Basin is available at www.grid.unep.ch/product/ publication/download/tisza.pdf. —MARIA BURKE
© 2005 American Chemical Society
