Pollution fight pits South, Northeast

Pollution fight pits South, Northeast

By MARGARET NEWKIRK / Cox News Service

ATLANTA — For almost a month now, a group of state attorneys general has been railing against what it calls the Bush administration's latest assault on the Clean Air Act — and backing it up with litigation.

The latest perceived outrage: A Nov. 5 announcement that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would review cases against alleged polluters to see whether the violations were still illegal under a law the EPA had just weakened a week earlier.

The attorneys general vowed to enforce the old law with their own lawsuits. They also sued in federal court to stop the more relaxed law and — just this week — filed to stop it from taking effect in several states next month.

Missing from the litigants, each time, were Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker and every other attorney general in the South.

In fact, to the extent that any Southern state has weighed in on any of this year's clean air controversies at all, they've done so in defense of the EPA and against the Northeast-led states' lawyers challenging it.

The South's stance reflects a sharp and stubborn regional divide over Clean Air Act policies. The divide breaks according to, literally, which way the wind blows and the cost of power in a particular region.

Environmentalists say the division reflects the influence wielded by Atlanta-based Southern Co., the Southeast's biggest electric utility and leader of the national lobbying effort that won the recent changes to the federal clean air law.

They also hold a hope — albeit a slim one — that change could be coming in the form of a new generation of state politicians and increasing concern about air pollution at home.

In Georgia, a new director of the state agency charged with setting the state's environmental policies — and the environmental agenda for the state's attorney general — took office this week.

In North Carolina, environmentalists are optimistic that Attorney General Roy Cooper will buck the Southern trend and join the fight against the most recent Clean Air Act change. And Mississippians last week elected an attorney general, Jim Hood, who is well-respected by the Sierra Club, on the same ballot in which they elected former Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour as governor.

Barbour is a former Southern Co. lobbyist who was instrumental in getting the Clean Air Act requirements loosened, and environmentalists hope Hood can balance his influence.

"We're just glad we got somebody in office willing to be a stopgap for that kind of agenda," said Louie Miller, head of the Mississippi Sierra Club.

The Clean Air Act has a long history of regional divisiveness, and the wind plays a big part in it.

It blows from west to east, and swirls north at the same time. The Northeast is downwind of practically everybody.

From its first incarnation in 1970, the Clean Air Act has held one source of upwind pollution as a key target – coal-fired power plants in the Midwest and South, which put out chemicals that cause acid rain, contribute to smog, contaminate fish and contribute to global warming.

Tough national clean air laws became a passion in the Northeast states in large part because that's where problems like acid rain first showed themselves, in the form of lifeless lakes with water clear as gin and acidic as lemon juice.

The Northeast states also largely use cleaner and more expensive fuels than coal to produce their electricity, and their higher rates reflect that. The South and Midwest rely on coal, and their electricity consumers pay less because of that.

The price difference is a second reason the Clean Air Act plays better politically in the Northeast than it does here. The changes the Northeast wants to see from clean air laws – cleaned up or closed down coal-fired power plants in the South and Midwest – will come out of ratepayer pockets in the South and Midwest.

The message is polished to populist perfection by the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a Washington lobbying group founded and funded by Southern Co. and five other utilities.

According to the ERCC's Frank Maisano, the attorneys general in the Northeast want to level the playing field, bring up the price of power in the South and "install New York-style costs on the poor people of Mississippi."

Southern Co. officials, asked to comment on the regional politics of the Clean Air Act, declined to talk and referred all questions to lobbyist Maisano.

The regional rift played out for years in fierce arguments about how much of the blame for the Northeast's pollution problems lies with other states. The regions dueled with competing studies and experts and dismissed one another's "junk science" in testy multistate task force meetings.

The hostilities peaked in a swell of lawsuits from all sides in the late 1990s, followed by a 1999 bombshell from the EPA and the Justice Department.

With vocal support from the Northeast, the Justice Department sued a handful of the country's largest coal-fired power companies in the South and Midwest, including Southern Co.

The suits claimed the utilities had violated the Clean Air Act for decades by keeping old plants running without pollution controls, and threatened fines of up to $27,000 per day for each violation.

When the Bush administration softened the Clean Air Act on Oct. 27, it changed the part of the law the utilities were accused in court of violating.

A dozen attorneys general, mostly from the Northeast, sued immediately.

This week, when the group filed to enjoin the law from taking effect in 12 states where it would otherwise take effect next month, their number had grown to 14 -- still with no one from the South.

Even as the EPA's new pollution rule is challenged in federal courts, the battle is moving to the other states, including Georgia, which must decide whether to change their own clean air laws in response to Washington's actions.

They have up to three years to decide.

Environmentalists are pinning their hopes on new faces in public life -- and on older hands, like North Carolina Attorney General Cooper, who may be leaning their way.

The multistate Southern Alliance for Clean Energy has identified Cooper as the only attorney general in the South even considering joining in the legal challenges to the Clean Air Act changes. Cooper's office did not return repeated calls for comment on that prospect.

The Sierra Club-friendly new attorney general-elect in Mississippi, Hood, said it was too soon for him to talk.

And while Georgia's attorney general isn't ruling out a more active role in the power plant battle, according to a spokesman, Baker is not leaping out front, according to spokesman Russ Willard.

Instead, Willard said, he'll take his cues from the state's new Environmental Protection Division director, Carol Couch. An EPD spokesman said it was too soon for Couch to talk about her opinion on the issue.

The head of the state EPD's air protection branch, Ron Methier, said Georgia doesn't need to step into the litigation, since other states have it covered. "We don't think joining the lawsuits would be really helpful," he said.

For now, he said, the agency is concentrating on drafting its own rules in response to the Clean Air Act changes, which could be ready by the end of next year. The EPD plans to conduct public hearings and watch the unfolding legal battle.

Environmentalists' fears, meanwhile, are driven by Southern Co.'s political clout and its unswerving support for the law as it is now written in Washington.

The company's political largess is legendary: It was the second highest contributor to federal political candidates among energy companies in 2000, outdone only by Enron, according to the Center for Responsive Politics campaign database.

Its giving to state office seekers has been significant, too, particularly in Alabama, where corporate and employee political action committees alone poured $1.2 million into state races between 1998 and 2002, according to the Institute on Money in State Politics.

And then there's Barbour, Southern Co.'s top lobbyist.

His election this month as Mississippi's governor has become an emblem for the company's footprint in the Southeast, said Neill Herring, lobbyist for Georgia's Sierra Club.