Two broad strategies exist for controlling air pollution from large industrial sources. One is to modernize and improve efficiency as facilities are expanded or changed. The other is simply to resist expansion and change.
The US Environmental Protection Agency sensibly accommodates expansion with its Aug. 1 proposal to clarify New Source Review (NSR) applicability.
Codifying guidance
The proposal would codify guidance EPA issued in March 2018 about determining NSR permit and emission-control requirements for a company planning to build or modify a source of air pollution, such as a refinery or processing unit. The program aims to keep air quality from deteriorating in areas meeting national standards and to sustain improvement in nonattainment areas.
NSR prescribes two steps for determining whether planned work is “major” and thus requires demanding permits and controls. The first step tests whether the change alone will create a “significant emission increase” of a regulated pollutant. The second step, if needed, tests whether a “significant net emission increase” will result from the project after accounting for emissions increases and decreases for all work occurring at the facility at the same time. The second step incorporates what EPA calls “project emissions accounting.”
The proposed rule applies to modifications involving combinations of new and existing units. It makes project emissions accounting part of the first step of the NSR major applicability test.
The proposal aims at “reforming the elements of NSR that regularly discouraged facilities from upgrading and deploying the latest energy-efficient technologies,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a press release. “By simplifying the permitting process and implementing a common-sense interpretation of our NSR rules, we will remove a major obstacle to the construction of cleaner and more-efficient facilities.” Oil and gas industry groups have argued that the two-step NSR applicability test is cumbersome and a source of uncertainty in investment planning. Concerns like those, shared by other industries, drive several other NSR changes or proposals by the Trump administration.
Environmental groups, of course, don’t sympathize. Jonathan Levenshus, director of federal campaigns at the Sierra Club, accused Wheeler, in press statement responding to the proposal, of “working for his former clients to undercut the EPA’s clean air protections.” In addition to serving at EPA in the administration of George H.W. Bush and on Senate committee staffs, Wheeler worked for a law firm and consultancy that represented coal interests. “By attacking the New Source Review program,” Levenshus said, “he’s allowing some of the wealthiest industries in our country to avoid cleaning up their air emissions instead of installing modern pollution controls on their dirty facilities.”
Groups like the Sierra Club argue this way. They steer their arguments toward personalities and affiliations and away from issues. They do that because their positions on issues are so frequently strained.
In his statement, Levenshus acknowledges no possibility that facility construction and modification can lower net emissions of air pollutants. Yet much plant construction these days occurs for precisely that reason. To the Sierra Club, apparently, construction is tolerable only if it includes installation of the costliest pollution-control equipment—even if emissions aren’t serious enough to require that much remediation and even if the requirement discourages work able to lower facility emissions overall.
Familiar agenda
Rigidity like this emerges from a familiar political agenda that myopically pursues one-dimensional environmental values and resists work. Limiting construction—by, for example, requiring unnecessary levels of emission control—is one way to keep air emissions from rising locally. Applied regionally, nationally, or globally, though, the strategy hinders the economic growth essential to modernization and efficiency improvement. Those elements of business evolution explain why countries with the strongest economies perform best in the mitigation of air pollution.
Construction and upgrades can and do improve the net environmental performance of facilities that emit air pollutants. EPA deserves credit for broadening NSR’s embrace of modernization and efficiency. The flexibility will help the program maintain environmental progress while also letting the economy grow.