Federal legislation would undermine North Carolina's efforts to reduce pollution blowing across the mountains from other states, businesspeople and lawmakers from Western North Carolina said Tuesday. They urged the state's congressional delegation to oppose it.
Federal legislation would undermine North Carolina's efforts to reduce pollution blowing across the mountains from other states, businesspeople and lawmakers from Western North Carolina said Tuesday. They urged the state's congressional delegation to oppose it.
Appalachian Voices, a Boone-based regional conservation group, delivered letters signed by 300 business owners to congressional offices on the eve of a possible committee vote in Washington on the bill, representatives said at a news conference in Raleigh.
The Bush administration says the legislation, known as Clear Skies, would reduce emissions of sulfur dioxides and nitrogen oxides from power plants over the next 13 years and cap emissions of mercury. Proponents say the system would make the air cleaner at less cost to utilities.
Opponents say the legislation threatens North Carolina's emissions caps. They say it could hamper states' ability to seek pollution cuts from utilities in upwind states.
Mack Pearsall, a lawyer and real estate developer in Asheville, said North Carolina has taken steps to protect its environment because North Carolinians recognize that prosperity depends on a healthy environment.
!ADVERTISEMENT!
"The very thought of having our hard-fought efforts in North Carolina gutted ... is repugnantly disheartening to me," he said.
The state's 2002 Clean Smokestacks Act requires coal-fired power plants to reduce smog- and haze-forming pollutants by three-fourths by 2013. Coal-fired plants are among the largest producers of pollutants that obscure mountain views and make breathing more difficult for people with asthma. Roughly one-third of North Carolina's 100 counties do not meet federal standards for ozone or fine particle pollution.
Sen. John Garwood, a Wilkes County Republican, said that he doesn't consider himself an environmentalist but that he supports the state's efforts to reduce air pollution because it is the right thing to do.
"It just doesn't make sense for North Carolina to support relaxing standards for other states, particularly those upwind, when our own utilities are taking the initiative and leading the nation in reducing their pollution," Garwood said.
Sen. Martin Nesbitt, a Democrat from Buncombe County, said the federal government needs to put more pressure on utilities to reduce pollution, not less. He said North Carolina desperately needs federal officials' help to get its neighbors to reduce pollution that blows into the state.
North Carolina has petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to require upwind states, such as Tennessee and Georgia, to reduce pollution that blankets North Carolina mountains in haze. In a letter to Congress, state Attorney General Roy Cooper said the proposed federal changes would weaken states' ability to file such petitions and would delay any action required on them until 2014.
In a statement, Hugh Morton, owner of Grandfather Mountain, a scenic attraction in the Blue Ridge Mountains, urged North Carolina's congressional delegation not to undercut state law.
"As I have witnessed firsthand from the vantage of Grandfather Mountain over the recent decades, air quality has gotten nothing but worse," he said.
Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
