<< Back 11/27/02 Edwards faults EPA decision to ease clean air rules SMN U.S. Senator John Edwards on Friday called a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency decision to ease clean air rules a windfall for the utility, coal and oil industries that lobbied for weaker pollution rules. The rule changes by the EPA will make it easier for utilities and refinery operators to expand old plants without installing modern equipment to limit pollution. “This gift to polluters promises more smog, more soot, and more premature deaths,” Edwards said. “These measures by the Bush Administration will delay, and perhaps defeat, efforts to make polluters follow the law and protect human health.” A former top EPA official told Edwards that settlements of pending cases and the filing of new cases “have ground virtually to a halt” since the Bush administration proposed changing the rules. Sylvia K. Lowrance, the recently retired top career official in EPA’s enforcement office, said violations of the law remain “widespread.” The comments by the long-time EPA official came in a letter responding to questions posed by Edwards after a Senate hearing he chaired last Sept. 9 on the pending changes in enforcement of the clean air law. At that special hearing of a Senate health panel, Edwards said, air pollution is “one of the most pressing health issues in our country today,” and noted that dirty air is a “health crisis” in parts of North Carolina, where smog levels exceeded health standards on more than twice as many days this summer as last year. Former EPA Administrator Carol Browner told the hearing that the proposal to change the New Source Review Program “abandons the promise of the Clean Air Act – steady air quality improvements.” Dr. Clay Ballantine, a physician from Asheville, testified that the top three killers in the United States are cadiovascular diseases, cancer and lung disease – all illnesses that are aggravated by air pollution exposure. Scientists have helped gain ground on the first two diseases, he said, but we are losing the battle against lung disease. “For 30 years, Americans’ best hope for breathing healthy air has been vigorous enforcement of the bipartisan Clean Air Act,” Edwards said. “Now, instead of rolling back pollution, the Bush administration has rolled back the Clean Air Act’s protections.”