Tough new clean-air rules will target drifting pollution

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson is expected to announce tough new regulations Thursday that seek to significantly reduce emissions from many coal-fired power plants.

The new measures will cover plants in as many as 28 states whose pollution blows into other states. They are expected to save 14,000 to 36,000 lives a year, says Janice Nolen of the American Lung Association. But various business groups and some congressional Republicans are calling them job-killing and unnecessary.

The Clean Air Transport Rule addresses the problem of coal-fired power plants in some states creating pollution that drifts into other states, which EPA is required to address under the Clean Air Act. Under the regulation, plants in affected states will begin reducing emissions in 2012.

By 2014 the new regulations are expected to reduce sulfur dioxide by 73% and reduce nitrogen oxides by 54% from 2005 levels. These emissions can form fine-particle pollution and smog, both of which are particularly dangerous to people with lung and heart disease.

The new regulations will likely inflame already heated opposition in some quarters to EPA regulations.

A policy rider announced Wednesday by House Republicans would prevent EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants for one year. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's Interior, Environment and Related Agencies panel, said the provision was necessary to rein in out-of-control and job-killing regulation.

But EPA says reduced emissions will lead to $280 billion in lower health and environmental costs a year, which the agency says far outweighs the annual cost of compliance of $800 million.

How much is cheap energy worth, asks the American Lung Association's Nolen. "Is it worth 36,000 American lives a year? That's a pretty significant price to pay."

Are EPA's estimates of $280 billion in health and environmental savings realistic?

While it's difficult to correctly estimate the benefits and costs of such regulations, says Ted Gayer, an expert on energy economics at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., sulfur dioxide reductions generally result in big health care savings compared with costs. But that's only if they're done in a cost-effective manner using market-friendly trading systems that let companies with emission levels below what's required to sell rights to those emissions to other firms. The exact mechanism EPA will use isn't known.

EPA has estimated that the benefits will outweigh the costs by a factor of between 40 and 100 to one.

The standards replace the Clean Air Interstate Rule, originally proposed by the Bush administration in 2005, which was tossed out in 2008 when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ordered it revised, saying it did not meet the requirements of the Clean Air Act.