In 2002 the North Carolina General Assembly passed the “clean smokestacks” bill. The legislation mandates dramatic reductions in emissions from coal-fired power plants run by Duke Power Co. and Progress Energy and will cost North Carolina electric customers more than $2 billion over the next eight years. In spite of the high price tag, the law was enacted with no cost-benefit analysis or serious scientific investigation of its health effects. Now that these costs are a permanent part of living and doing business in North Carolina, Attorney General Roy Cooper has decided to use a little-known aspect of the law in an attempt to impose these hardships on our neighbors. The smokestacks bill authorizes the state to “use all available resources and means,” including lawsuits, “to induce other states…to achieve reductions in emissions…comparable to those required [in NC]…”
North Carolina’s smokestacks regulations are much more stringent than those enacted by other states or the federal EPA. Ever since the bill was passed, Cooper has been using the presumed moral authority that it gives North Carolina on air quality issues to pursue what might best be called “environmental imperialism” with respect to our neighbors.
Last year, shortly after passage of the bill, he sent a threatening letter to seven Southeastern states, stating “…North Carolinians do not want the benefits created by this new law to be lost because of emissions from other states. We will look at all options available to us to ensure that that does not happen.” It should be noted that this is an analytically vacuous threat, since there is no serious scientific analysis identifying what those benefits are. Governor Mike Easley and the Republicans and Democrats in the Assembly relied almost completely on propaganda from left-wing environmental pressure groups as justification for the bill.
Now it appears that the administration, through its attorney general’s office, is continuing to carry the water for these same groups. The point is to have the courts force an ideological agenda onto states whose legislatures are not the water boys found in Raleigh. Cooper’s latest assault on the sovereignty of our neighbors comes in the form of a threat to pursue action through the EPA against Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. While providing no evidence, Cooper strongly suggests that emissions from these states are responsible for possible compliance problems with EPA pollution standards in Charlotte, Hickory, and Lexington. The N.C. Division of Air Quality has determined that these areas are in danger of not meeting new EPA regulations on what is called particulate matter, or “soot.”
First, it is not clear yet whether these areas will indeed fail the EPA test. A determination is not due until next year. But more importantly, there is no reason to believe that the problems that these three locations may be experiencing have anything to do with emissions coming from other states.
According to a report in the Lexington Dispatch, problems in these locations could be due to where the DAQ has placed the monitors that measure the amount of soot in the air. Fine particles are the result of burning fuels such as coal, gasoline, diesel, oil, and wood. The monitor in Lexington is located next to a wood-burning barbecue restaurant, railroad tracks carrying diesel locomotives, and a furniture factory. Guy Cornman, Davidson County planning director, is quoted as saying that Sheila Holman from the DAQ “almost guaranteed us we could get lower readings” from a monitor in a different location. In addition, The Dispatch revealed that the monitor in Hickory is near a railroad and furniture plant, and a monitor in Charlotte that consistently gets above-normal readings is also next to a barbecue restaurant. This suggests that Cooper’s office has either not done its homework or it is deliberately harassing the citizens of other states. In either case its actions are inconsistent with the best interests of North Carolina and good relations with our neighbors.
It is clear that when it comes to environmental policy, North Carolina’s policy makers have been motivated primarily by ideology and environmentalist propaganda, with little attention paid to sound scientific analysis. This was clearly the case with the Easley administration’s dogged pursuit of the clean smokestacks bill and it appears to be equally true for Cooper’s crusade of environmental imperialism.