Posted on March 16, 2015 by Dick Stoll
(Reproduced with permission from Daily Environment Report, den, 03/12/2015. Copyright 2015 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033) http://www.bna.com)
Another Environmental Protection Agency battle focusing on coal has recently ended—for now at least. While most recent coal warfare has been fought on Clean Air Act fronts, this battle was fought on the fields of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The target is coal combustion residuals (CCR) generated by electric utilities.
The EPA’s CCR rule will soon be published in the Federal Register. It has been a long time coming. The flash point for the rulemaking—the Archduke Ferdinand moment—was the December, 2008 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Kingston, Tennessee incident. TVA’s ash pond dike ruptured and millions of gallons of coal ash and water spilled into the surrounding waters and land.
The Kingston spill received extensive press coverage, and it occurred just a few weeks after President Barack Obama was elected. Obama had nominated Lisa Jackson to be his EPA Administrator, and at her Senate confirmation hearing in January 2009, Jackson committed to take aggressive regulatory action to minimize the chances of similar occurrences in the future.
The EPA first proposed the rule in 2010, and issued three supplemental notices along the way. In 2013, because it was starting to look as though the EPA would take forever to issue a final rule, both industry and public interest groups secured a ‘‘citizens suit’’ federal court order forcing a deadline.
Now that the rule is out, more battles are coming. In light of the intense and polarized advocacy during the rule’s development, both judicial review and attempts to amend RCRA are a virtual certainty. And remarkably, for the most pivotal issue of the battle, the EPA’s new rule simply kicks the can down the road—thus setting up a completely new round of rulemaking unless Congress intervenes…
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Tags: EPA, Coal, Coal Combustion Residual Rule