Polluters to spend $10.6 billion to clean up
The Environmental Protection Agency, roundly criticized by environmental activists for being too lenient with polluters, announced that enforcement actions completed in the last year will force major polluters to invest a record $10.6 billion in pollution-control equipment.
Once installed, the equipment will prevent 890 million pounds of pollutants from entering the nation's air, soil and waterways each year, according to the agency's annual report on enforcement.
"That shows the robustness of what we're doing here," said Granta Nakayama, EPA's lead enforcement officer. "And 2008 will be a record-shattering year."
That's because the announced totals for fiscal 2007 do not include EPA's October agreement with American Electric Power, the largest environmental settlement in history. It requires the Ohio-based utility to install $4.6 billion of pollution controls that will reduce pollution by 1.6 billions pounds annually.
Nakayama said this year's results - against Alcoa, the city of Indianapolis and the New Jersey-based utility PSEG, among others - prove that the agency's critics are wrong when they complain of lax enforcement. He called such criticism "bean counting," and said it overemphasizes the number of cases opened or enforcement actions taken. He said EPA is more focused on larger cases.
"We could do a lot of small cases, or we could focus on those that have more environmental impact," Nakayama said. "You want to maximize your resources."
Eric Schaeffer, who quit in protest as the head of EPA's Office of Regulatory Enforcement in 2002, says the latest report reflects mixed results. "We like to see their stronger action on some of the big cases," said Schaeffer, who founded the Environmental Integrity Project, an environmental enforcement watchdog group, "but we'd also like to see bigger penalties."
He said the level of fines and criminal cases initiated left something to be desired. He noted that environmental crime cases opened by the EPA had fallen from 471 in 2003 to 305 in 2006 before bumping up about 10 percent this year, and civil penalties totaled just $71 million, less than half the 2004 and 2005 totals.
"In terms of deterrent value on the civil side, I don't necessarily see a big change in the (downward) trend," Schaeffer said.
An assessment of results should also take into account that the enforcement office's "ability to enforce the laws - the Clean Air Act in particular - was badly hurt" by the Bush administration, Schaeffer said.
"It's been a tough fight for enforcement," he said. But EPA's enforcement officials "didn't give up. They kept bringing in cases, and we appreciate that."
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