Earth (to Bush) Day

Earth (to Bush) Day

April 22, 2005

Today is Earth Day and President Bush plans to visit the Great Smoky Mountain National Park to tout his clean air policies. True to its name, Great Smoky has the worst air pollution of any national park in America.  Despite a 2000 campaign promise to improve air quality in our parks, President Bush's policies have actively undermined air quality in national parks and their surrounding communities.

• The president's "Clear Skies" initiative means more hazy parks. The administration's Clear Skies Act eliminates a key provision of the Clean Air Act program that requires old, polluting power plants to install modern emissions controls. "Clear Skies" offers no specific alternative to clean up these older, highly polluting plants.  It delays other sources of park pollution, such as older refineries, incinerators, steel mills, and pulp and paper plants, from cleaning up for 20 more years in exchange for comparatively minor air pollution reductions.  It also prohibits park superintendents from commenting on permits for major new sources of air pollution that are located more than 31 miles from large parks. Virtually all of the power plant pollution that harms the Great Smoky Mountains comes from plants outside the proposed 31-mile review perimeter.
  
  
• Rather than eliminating air pollution, the White House wants to shift it around from state to state.  The Clear Skies Act effectively eliminates the possibility of states situated downwind of pollution sources from implementing any remedy until 2015.  Additionally, the administration's recently completed Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) establishes a "cap and trade" system for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide pollution from power plants in 28 eastern states. While CAIR would reduce some of the sulfur and nitrogen emissions that harm the Great Smoky Mountains, it will not restore park air quality to natural conditions as required by the Clean Air Act. CAIR will not protect the parks to the same degree as would requiring all major park-polluting facilities to install the "best available retrofit technologies" to reduce their emissions.
  
  
• Expect the nation's parks to get more polluted in the upcoming years.  According to EPA's own estimates, even after full implementation of CAIR's sulfur dioxide reductions, only one of Tennessee's six counties that now fail to meet clean air standards for sulfur-dioxide related "fine particle pollution" will be brought into compliance. Anderson, Blount, Knox, Loudon, and Roane counties-all in or near Great Smoky Mountains National Park-will continue to have fine particle pollution beyond mandated levels in the Clean Air Act.  Americans can expect more hazy air and obscured vistas in the Smokies and other parks for the foreseeable future.

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