Environmental advocates are calling out the White House for attempting to curtail standards that would prevent the coal power industry from continuing to dump hazardous and carcinogenic chemicals into American waterways.
A coalition of the nation’s leading environmental organizations released a report this week slamming the coal industry as the number one source of toxic pollution in American waterways and a habitual violator of Clean Water Act standards.
“What this report shows very clearly is that over the last 30 years, coal plants have gotten special treatment,” Clean Water Action President and CEO Robert Wendelgass said in a Tuesday telephone press conference following the release of the report.
The report, “Closing the Floodgates: How the Coal Industry is Poisoning Our Water and How We Can Stop it,” aims to highlight coal’s impact on public health, particularly when it comes to the contamination of drinking water sources relied upon by more than 115 million Americans. It also highlights an opportunity for the Environmental Protection Agency to implement standards on an industry practice that hasn’t been reliably regulated since the 1980s.
Key to the report is the discovery that 70 percent of the nation’s 274 coal plants that discharge wastewater and coal ash into waterways are not subject to regulations that safeguard the public from common chemicals found in that wastewater.
The unregulated release of mercury, arsenic, lead and boron, among other chemicals, is of top concern to environmental organizations pressuring the EPA to take action.
“This is a witch’s brew of pollution that’s linked to everything from cancer to birth defects to lower IQs in our children,” Mary Anne Hitt, director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, said during the Tuesday press conference.
According to the EPA, roughly 140,000 people each year are subject to heightened risk of cancer due to the level of arsenic in fish — a direct result of coal power plant discharge.
The authors of the report acknowledged that some coal companies have taken it upon themselves to implement filtration systems that halt the release of toxins into waterways. But without federal standards, these companies are operating on an uneven playing field.
“Americans do not need to live with these dangerous discharges,” the report states. “Wastewater treatment technologies that drastically reduce, and even eliminate, discharges of toxic pollution are widely available, and are already in use at some power plants in the United States.”
The release comes just a month after President Barack Obama’s climate change address, during which he targeted the coal industry and called for stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Waterway pollution from coal plants was left out of the equation.
Fighting industry influence
In April, the EPA proposed national standards that would limit the amount of chemicals coal plants are lawfully allowed to dump into the country’s waterways.
This is encouraging for those who have been pushing for more stringent regulations since the 1980s, when relaxed regulations allowed the industry to operate without restrictions.
According to the report, almost half of the coal plants surveyed are operating under an expired Clean Water Act permit. More than 50 of those plants hadn’t bothered to obtain a permit in more than five years.
“The industry that pollutes our waters most is the industry that’s subject to the weakest pollutant limits,” Abigail Dillen, vice president of climate and energy for Earthjustice, said in the press conference.
While those regulations are now getting another look, there’s still concern that industry pressure will take the proposed EPA standards in the wrong direction.
Organizations involved in the report’s publication revealed what they discovered upon reviewing a copy of the EPA’s proposed coal plant pollution standards after it was submitted to the White House Office of Management and Budget.
The White House copy revealed that OMB staff revised the proposed EPA rules in favor of industry requests.
“We did obtain a marked-up copy of EPA proposed standards before and after they went the review process, and that marked-up copy showed that the White House caved to industry pressure and took the highly unusual step of writing in several new options into the draft rule that had been prepared by EPA experts,” Hitt said.
According to the report, visitor logs showed that coal industry representatives met with OMB staff and other White House agencies.
“What is clear is that OMB — whether on its own or, more likely, at the behest of industry players — acted to weaken the proposed rule,” the report states.
Aside from the OMB recommendations, the proposed standards did what environmental advocates claim should have been done in 1982, when the first set of “restrictions” were implemented on the coal industry.
The strongest option included in the EPA’s proposals would almost entirely eliminate coal plants’ discharge of toxic waste into the nation’s waterways.
A separate, less stringent option would halt ash-contaminated discharge from entering waterways and would require treatment of “scrubber sludge.” This isn’t environmental watchdogs’ first choice, as it would only reduce the amount of pollution discharged by coal plants by 3.3 billion pounds a year, according to a press release.
Meanwhile, the OMB’s industry-friendly options would put no limit on discharge from scrubber sludge, leaving the standards up to the states instead. Yet, as the report indicates, the states already have already proven their inability to implement regulations over the last 30 years.
A perpetual problem
At issue among those fighting for stricter EPA standards on coal plants is the concern that, without strong regulations, even more dangerous chemicals will be dumped into America’s waterways and natural habitats.
“They will not go away, they’re with us forever,” Erik Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said in the press conference. “They stack up in the water column, concentrate at toxic levels in fish and other aquatic life, and make the habitat unsafe and drinking water intake with metals that have to be removed at great expense by the public.”
With waterways already experiencing contamination, the report’s authors are urging the EPA to implement standards that will limit the amount of toxins emitted into the water in the future.
“As a mom who loves to take my little 3-year-old daughter fishing and swimming and boating on the streams and rivers of West Virginia where I live, I know what is at stake,” Hitt said.
According to an Earthjustice analysis on the health impacts of coal ash contaminants, there is plenty at stake.
Arsenic, just one contaminant emitted through coal plants’ ash, can lead to nerve damage, urinary tract cancers and cardiovascular issues when ingested. Absorbing arsenic through the skin at high concentrations can cause lung and skin cancer.
“These dangerous discharges have serious consequences for communities that live near coal-fired power plants and their dumps across the United States,” the report states. “Tens of thousands of miles of rivers are degraded by this pollution.”
According to Wendelgass, 40 percent of coal power plant discharges occur within 5 miles of bodies of water that serve as sources of drinking water.
Before the EPA’s proposal is finalized, environmental organizations will hold rallies throughout the U.S., particularly in areas that are home to coal power plants. Events range from a “Miss and Mr. Toxic Water Swimsuit Competition” to a kayaking trip in the lakes surrounding an Oklahoma power plant.