The Environmental Protection Agency is seeking permission from a federal court to further delay the implementation of rules — already a decade overdue — that would reduce the level of haze-causing pollution from power plants in Texas.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday to extend the deadline for the agency to decide on whether to accept a state regional haze plan or a federal plan for Texas. The agency’s Regional Haze Rule requires states to develop plans to clean up pollution and improve air quality at national parks and wilderness areas.

The court set a September 9 deadline for the EPA to make a decision on whether to choose the federal or state plan. But the agency, in its filing, said it wants the court to extend the deadline for making a decision to December 31, 2018.

“Circumstances have changed significantly over the past several months and weeks as EPA and Texas have engaged in a productive level of dialogue that has not occurred in many years,” Pruitt said in the filing. The discussions have allowed the EPA and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to develop a state implementation plan that “addresses the concerns raised by the state, the EPA said.

Opponents to the EPA’s proposed delay must file their objections with the federal court by August 29.

Last week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and the chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality sent a letter to Pruitt committing to work with the federal agency to establish a state implementation plan by the end of 2018, the EPA said in its court filing. The letter stated that installing pollution control equipment, as required by the EPA’s federal implementation plan, would come at a “substantial cost.”


Instead, Texas officials want to implement an intrastate trading program that would give power plants in the state “the flexibility to purchase allowances rather than install new equipment” to reduce their pollution.

Pruitt wants “to abandon the residents of his home state to placate Texas polluters who don’t give a second thought about Oklahoma families or its natural places,” Johnson Bridgwater, director of the Sierra Club’s Oklahoma chapter, said in a statement on Friday. Since taking over as EPA administrator, Pruitt has made clear he is a “servant to coal companies eager to find ways around our environmental safeguards to make a buck,” he stated.

The EPA’s Regional Haze Rule required states to submit their implementation plans to the agency by December 17, 2007 — almost 10 years ago. In 2009, the agency found that a number of states, including Texas, had failed to submit plans to address regional haze; the finding triggered the EPA’s obligation to develop a federal implementation plan within two years.

Despite numerous opportunities, Texas refused to produce a “meaningful plan to clean up pollution from coal plants and other industrial sources,” the Sierra Club said in news release on Friday. As a result of the lack of action by Texas, the EPA developed a proposed rule in 2016 that would dramatically reduce air pollution caused by Texas’ coal-fired power plants and would improve air quality in the entire region.

Texas’ coal fired-power plants emit more than 338,853 tons of sulfur dioxide, while Oklahoma and Arkansas plants emit a combined 152,599 tons of SO2. Texas “is pumping this haze pollution and it is travelling into our neighboring states,” according to the Sierra Club.


The group estimates that in Oklahoma alone, implementing the plan proposed by the EPA would prevent more than 2,100 asthma attacks, 78 deaths, and 9,400 missed workdays that are caused by pollution from nearby Texas’s coal-fired power plants.

“After the multi-year process, Administrator Pruitt had the opportunity to finalize the plan by September 9, but has instead asked the court for another year and a half delay while Texas and EPA create an unlawful pollution trading program that allows polluters to continue the status quo rather than complying with the Clean Air Act. Meanwhile, communities in Oklahoma must continue to suffer under the haze of Texas’ pollution,” the Sierra Club said.