Leaders band together against air pollution from Midwest

ROCKPORT — New England governors and eastern Canadian premiers vowed Tuesday to band together to stop power plants in the Midwest from spewing pollution that fouls this region’s air.

Meeting at the Samoset Resort, the government leaders called upon their respective federal governments to do more to make polluters outside the region stop emitting ozone-causing chemicals that are blown into the eastern United States and Canada. They also agreed to pursue as many means as possible — such as court battles and public information campaigns — to embarrass the offending power plants into cleaning up their acts.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Congress and the power plants have refused to do the right thing, so “maybe we need to embarrass them into doing the right thing,” Massachusetts Gov. Paul Cellucci said.

The coal-fired power plants are exempted from meeting provisions of the 1990 Clean Air Act because it was assumed that the facilities, many of them more than 30 years old, would soon be out of commission. The plants, however, have stayed in operation and some have had costly upgrades that keep them functional.

The New York state attorney general recently filed a lawsuit against the plants because substantial upgrades have been made while equipment that would reduce emissions has not been installed.

Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont said his state intended to join the lawsuit and he urged his other New England counterparts to do the same thing.

Maine is working on a “friend of the court” brief it will file in the case, Gov. Angus King said. Maine does not intend to become a party to the suit because the state is farther from the power plants, which are mainly in the Ohio Valley, than New York, and would have a harder time proving that it is damaged by the polluted air.

The governors and premiers were shown several computer simulations and maps that showed polluted air, just like most weather patterns, traveled from the Midwest to the East Coast.

This prompted Brian Tobin, the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, to wonder when provincial, state and federal governments would tackle the problem. With the economy, especially in New England, doing well, Tobin said now was the time to act. If the governments didn’t tackle this problem when their coffers were flush, he wondered when they ever would.

He suggested that the region develop an informational campaign that would inform the people of the eastern United States and Canada of the problem. The campaign would also let the people of the Midwest know that their power plants were causing problems for the eastern part of the continent.

On the issue of one region telling another what to do, Premier Tobin wondered if the United States planned to follow the Kyoto accord, which in 1997 set standards for the reduction of so-called greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming. He said it would be hard for Canada to justify major expenditures to meet the guidelines if its larger southerly neighbor didn’t also do so.

None of the governors responded to Tobin’s question.

On related issues, the governors and premiers also passed resolutions calling for further reductions in the use of mercury and the emissions of chemicals that cause acid rain.

Similar resolutions were passed at last year’s annual governor and premier meeting and progress has been made on both issues.

But the use of mercury, especially in schools, still needs to be reduced, said Mark Smith of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.

The same is true of acid rain, which has decreased, but forest soils and some lakes are still plagued by high acid levels, according to Richard Valentinetti, air director for the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation.

The two countries agreed to share data and monitoring efforts to meet acid rain and mercury reduction goals that were set last year and are to be met by 2003.

At a meeting without their Canadian counterparts, the New England governors agreed to look at means other than quotas to control fish harvests in order to restore depleted marine fishery stocks.

Many New England fishermen have been angered by recent quotas on the number of fish they can catch in a day. The quota for cod was set at 30 pounds per trip this spring, before being upped to 100 pounds later in the summer and to 400 pounds last month.

The governors also passed a resolution calling upon the federal government to fulfill its commitment to construct a facility for the long-term storage of high-level nuclear waste. In 1982, the government agreed to construct such a facility, but has yet to even settle on a site. That has left states such as Maine with no place to send their radioactive waste.

The Maine Yankee nuclear power plant, which is closed and is being dismantled, has proposed to store its spent fuel rods in concrete casks that will be built at the Wiscasset facility because no federal storage is available.

The U.S. and Canadian government leaders meet annually to discuss issues and forge ties with one another. Next year’s conference, the 25th annual, will be held in Halifax, Nova Scotia.