CLOUDING THE AIR.(Bush Administration's assault on Clean Air Act)

Each year, the Detroit Edison plant in Monroe, Michigan, burns roughly eight million tons of coal. That is enough to generate electricity for three million homes and also to make the plant one of the nation's most extravagant polluters. In 2001, the last year for which complete data are available, Monroe's smokestacks emitted, among other things: more than a hundred thousand tons of sulfur dioxide (the principal pollutant in acid rain), nearly forty-six thousand tons of nitrous oxide (the chief ingredient of smog), and seventeen and a half million tons of carbon dioxide (the major culprit in global warming). Widely accepted statistical models project that the plant will cause some three hundred premature deaths annually, from ailments like lung disease and stroke. All of which makes President Bush's visit to Monroe last week to tout his latest air-quality initiatives either horribly ill-advised or, if you prefer, perversely appropriate.

Even in the catalogue of depredations that is the Bush Administration's environmental record--a list that includes the decision to reclassify various forms of mining waste as "fill" so that it can be dumped in valleys and streams; the attempt to open up millions of acres of public lands (including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) for oil exploration; and the so-called Healthy Forests initiative, whose major beneficiary is the logging industry--the President's assault on the Clean Air Act stands out. When Congress approved the act, back in 1970, its goal was explicitly to prevent plants like Detroit Edison's from being built. Because of the difficulty--the expense, really--of retrofitting existing plants, Congress granted them an exemption but some years later stipulated that if changes were made that went beyond "routine maintenance" the plants would have to be equipped with up-to-date pollution controls. In resisting this requirement, known as "new source review," or N.S.R., plant operators have over the years tried to define as "routine maintenance" projects that were essentially rebuilding efforts. (In one spectacular example, the Tennessee Valley Authority labelled as "routine maintenance" a project that required constructing an entire miniature monorail system.)

Then, last New Year's Eve, the Bush Administration proposed new rules that broadened the definition of "routine maintenance" to allow operators to make, in effect, any changes they want to their plants without installing new pollution controls. These rules were finalized just before Labor Day weekend, and, not coincidentally, before Governor Mike Leavitt, of Utah, the President's nominee to be the next E.P.A. administrator, was forced to take a position on them. (At an E.P.A. hearing in Salt Lake City this past spring, Utah's air-quality director labelled the Administration's plans for N.S.R. "a disastrous approach to managing air quality," "a step backward," and a "train wreck.") According to environmentalists, the new N.S.R. regulations would let the Monroe plant emit about forty thousand additional tons of sulfur dioxide a year.

Critics argue that the ...