Cleaning the air in the North Carolina mountains and elsewhere will take regional cooperation, national legislation and continued efforts toward conservation. What won’t help, however, are leaders who try to link current energy problems to important environmental legislation that has helped us to make significant reductions in the amount of pollutants in our air.

Unfortunately, there are those doing just that.

U.S. Rep. Joe Barton is a Texas Republican and the chairman of the House Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee. He spoke last week at the regional air quality conference held in Gatlinburg.

Barton used his podium time to say that the California energy crisis was the result of overly strict environmental regulations, and that some elements of the Clean Air Act might need to be dashed when the legislation comes back up for reauthorization.

There’s no doubt environmental regulations are part of the reason no new power plants have been built recently in California. But by now, most everyone knows that the real reason for the West Coast crisis was a flawed deregulation plan that left utility companies without a way to raise rates no matter how much their wholesale power was costing.

Besides, Barton’s argument simply ignores the reason for environmental regulations - to protect human health and the environment. Putting controls on pollutants and industrial wastes do indeed cost industry, but they save all of us from the cumulative effects of the pollutants.

The governors attending the summit last week in Gatlinburg pledged to work together to find ways to address regional air pollution. Environmentalists who attended countered that a regional solution would not be thorough enough. They argued that federal policy to reduce power plant emissions was absolutely necessary if we are truly going to solve our air pollution problems.

Those environmentalists are right, but that doesn’t negate the positive effects of regional cooperation. Gov. Mike Easley and the other chief executives can influence industry and legislators in their states, and that will build momentum toward national legislation that will one day no doubt be passed.

But people like Barton are simply clueless about the needs of this country’s citizens and the responsibility of polluters and the energy industry. We don’t have to strip environmental protections in order to provide the energy we need, we just have to be smart about how we produce it and be willing to pay the costs.

 

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The Smoky Mountain News