Earth Equity News

Opposition Mounts to Rule Change Allowing Coal Plants Near National Parks. By Duncan Mansfield, AP, June 21, 2008. "Critics fear the U.S. EPA will adopt a rule in the waning days of the Bush administration that will make it easier to build coal-fired power plants near national parks. The proposed change, pending since last June, comes as the utility industry moves into its biggest building boom in coal-fueled power plants in decades. To meet growing electricity needs, more than 20 plants are under construction in 14 states and more than 100 are in various stages of planning. Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, vowed in an interview... to push Congress to overrule the EPA if it enacts the rule, perhaps as early as this summer. The new rule would change the way states, the EPA and others calculate the impact of a new pollution source, like a coal plant, on a park's maximum pollution load, said John Bunyak of the National Park Service's Air Resources Division in Denver. Instead of weighing peak periods of pollution, the new rule would use annual averages. Don Barger... [of] the National Parks Conservation Association, compared it to a person sticking one hand in a block of ice and the other in a fire. 'Your average temperature is just fine, but your hands are not,' he said. 'You are getting some real impact there.'"