CLEAN AIR RIDE

While reducing pollution from school buses is a noble, but certainly not novel, cause, there are much bigger steps the federal government can take to clean the air in Maine. So, while the schoolchildren Michael Leavitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, meets in Portland today aren’t likely to complain about their cleaner buses, the state’s congressional delegation would rightly like attention focused on the issues of greater environmental concern in Maine. These include mercury and other air pollutants and global climate change.

The clean school bus program is a success. The Maine Department of Environmental Protection has received funds from the EPA – administrator Leavitt is in town to announce more money – to retrofit school buses with emission-control devices. The equipment cuts particulate pollution by 25 percent, which will reduce asthma attacks and respiratory distress among students, drivers, teachers and other community residents. The DEP hopes to retrofit 300 buses in 27 school districts. In addition to Portland, which will retrofit 20 buses, participating school districts include Presque Isle, Fort Kent, Caribou, Medway, East Machias and Ellsworth.

Also on the diesel front, the Bush administration moved ahead with rules to reduce the sulfur content in the fuel by 97 percent by 2006. Reducing the sulfur content in diesel fuel will allow advanced pollution controls to be more effective and the EPA estimates that buses and trucks with the new technology will be 95 percent cleaner than today’s models.

These rules show that putting stringent regulations in place works to meet environmental goals. However, on other fronts, the administration has abandoned tough regulations in favor of voluntary measures. Rather than adopting regulations requiring the installation of maximum achievable control technology (MACT) as required by the Clean Air Act, the EPA last year proposed a new cap-and-trade program that would allow power plants to buy and sell the right to emit mercury, a potent neurotoxin. MACT would have reduced mercury emissions by 90 percent by 2008. The cap-and-trade rule, which allows companies that cannot reduce their share of mercury emissions to pay for cuts at other facilities, would result in a 70 percent reduction by 2018.

Mr. Leavitt recently put the cap-and-trade program on hold so he could review it. Included in his review must a report issued by his own agency last month that showed the number of water bodies with fish consumption advisories because of high mercury levels increased almost 10 percent between 2002 and 2003. In Maine, 19 rivers and lakes have had such advisories for a decade.

Also involving air pollution, the agency has scrapped a rule, called new source review, that required power plants and factories to install new pollution control technology when they made major upgrades. Although new source review is no longer in effect, it has yet to be replaced by new rules.

Mr. Leavitt has also not said how he will square a new report, signed by two cabinet secretaries, that concludes that global climate change will have serious consequences and is worsened by human activities with his own agency’s reports that minimize the threat of climate change.

The Bush administration has gotten a lot of mileage out of its diesel rules. Now it is time to turn attention to implementing measures that will dramatically reduce emissions of mercury, climate-change-inducing greenhouse gases and other pollutants.