Once upon a time...ah, shit. This is not, unfortunately a fairy tale.

The Bush administration has drafted regulations that would ease pollution controls on older, dirtier power plants and could allow those that modernize to emit more pollution, rather than less.

The language could undercut dozens of pending state and federal lawsuits aimed at forcing coal-fired plants to cut back emissions of harmful pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, said lawyers who worked on the cases.
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Under the new standard, a modernized plant's total emissions could rise if the upgrade allowed it to operate longer hours. In court filings, the EPA estimated in 2002 that an hourly standard would allow eight plants in five states -- including Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia -- to generate legally as much as 100,000 tons a year of pollutants that would be illegal under the existing New Source Review rule. That equals about a third of their total emissions.
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But John Walke, NRDC's clean-air director, said: "This radical proposal is a 180-degree flip-flop from what the administration has been arguing in court. Instead of protecting public health, now EPA wants to protect the polluters. The proposal would completely sabotage clean-air law enforcement, and it would be open season for power plants to pollute even more than they do now."
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Eric Schaeffer, who headed the EPA's Office of Regulatory Enforcement before resigning in protest in February 2002, said the new rule undermines the original aim of the law, which was to slowly bring older plants into compliance with stricter air laws.

"Under this proposal, it would never happen," Schaeffer said.

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