Related Articles

Court Throws Out EPA Regulation That Would Hamper Utilities, Threaten Jobs

August 22, 2012

A new regulation spearheaded by the Environmental Protection Agency that would have put strain on the nation’s electric grid and risked thousands of IBEW jobs was tossed out in a federal appeals court ruling this week.

The EPA’s Cross State Air Pollution Rule was designed last year to reduce the amount of airborne emissions that generate largely from coal-fired power plants in 28 states, then travel downwind across state lines. The agency said the rule could reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxides by half over the next two years.

But many state and local governments, labor unions, utility  companies and other parties countered the rule in court, saying the EPA’s stringent timeline for compliance would shut down plants, slash middle class jobs and spark widespread blackouts, mainly in the Midwest.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in a 2-1 decision Aug. 21 that the EPA overstepped its authority, sending the agency back to the drawing board to revise its air pollution emissions plan.

The rule would have cost the industry more than $800 million annually in new equipment such as scrubbers to resource emissions, and failure to meet the agency’s targets would have yielded stiff fines, said IBEW Utility Department Director Jim Hunter:

The fines had the potential of basically bankrupting companies. This is a major victory for our thousands of members in dozens of states who work in coal-fired power plants.

Hunter cited the EPA’s timeline for compliance as “unrealistic.” For example, plants in Pennsylvania would have been given less than four months to bring emissions down 33 percent by next January, and down 73 percent by 2014. New Jersey plants would have had to slash a whopping 63 percent of emissions between now and early next year. Said Hunter:

The only way you’re going to be able to do that in a lot of cases is to shut plants down. That’s the hard reality of it. If you do that, you’re going to have higher unemployment and electrical blackouts in several parts of the nation.

Hunter added that from 1980 to today, the industry reduced plant emissions more than 80 percent. At the same time, new coal plants have been brought online to accommodate growing energy demand nationwide.

United Mine Workers of America International President Cecil Roberts praised the ruling in a statement:

Coal mining puts billions of dollars in the form of wages, benefits, taxes and vendor services into the economies of mostly rural, hard-pressed communities throughout the nation. This ruling provides a reprieve for those communities, and it is our hope that any future action on the part of EPA will finally take into account the full impact of its rulemaking on all concerned.

Said IBEW International President Edwin D Hill:

Like all Americans, the our union and the skilled IBEW men and women operating the nation’s coal-fired plants want to ensure that we protect the environment. The industry has already taken great steps in the past decades to eliminate a large percentage of emissions – and we’ve done so while protecting good American jobs. There’s no need to decimate a major portion of our energy infrastructure. We’ve proven we can balance the need for environmental concerns while maintaining the strength of this critical section of our economy.

Photo used under a Creative Commons License from Flickr user s_falkow.