Editorials

There's an important item that has flown under the radar of most residents in Alabama.

Officials in our state are looking to make changes to our air quality standards, rules that cover something called opacity. That's the particulate matter you see being belched into the sky from utility plants and other industries.

Adjusting the standards would affect utility plants, other industries and clean air.

Would these changes improve our air quality, you ask?

According to the governor's office, this is all for the better. In a letter dated June 17, Gov. Bob Riley urged the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Stephen Johnson, to approve the proposed changes, referring to them as "added protections."

A spokesman for the governor's office also insists the changes would only strengthen the existing standards.

"First of all, Alabama has the strictest opacity standard in the South," said Riley spokesman Todd Stacy. "We are not asking for a relaxation of air-quality regulations. In fact, to the contrary, Alabama has proposed more stringent standards for our state. We are simply asking the EPA to finally approve rules that they agreed to approve more than five years ago."

Then again, head out into the land of the environmentally minded and you'll find that this proposal is another attempt to help utilities and other industries rather than safeguard the health of the people of Alabama.

On a close read, the letter from the governor's office is vintage ADEM, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, the guardian of big business in the state. As usual, this letter contains all the ADEM ingredients — confusing verbiage, shades of fact and strange arguments — while failing to address the central point, which is clean air.

"There is no way you can say with any confidence that you are meeting standards with the rules changes they are proposing," said Eric Schaeffer, former head of the EPA's Office of Regulatory Enforcement. "I don't know how they could say with a straight face that these changes would be an improvement."

Schaeffer, who left the EPA in 2002 over policy disputes with the Bush administration, went on to say that this is an attempt by lobbyists to change the rules and that it represents an embarrassment to the EPA.

"The industry lobby worked hard for this," he said from his office at the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project in Washington. "The EPA knows better than to do this. It is inconsistent with what they have argued in other places."

Additionally, Schaeffer explained, particulate standards in Alabama are very generous and very old. The only thing these changes do is to "make it that much harder to see if even those lenient standards are met."

This issue will be discussed at a public meeting at 10 a.m. on Aug. 6 in the Main Hearing Room at the ADEM, 1400 Coliseum Blvd., in Montgomery. Soon after, bureaucrats will decide how clean or dirty our future will be.

If you attend, you might bring up what is always missing when it comes to environmental regulations at the state level in Alabama: The health of the people and the environment.

And that is not going to change until Alabamians insist that it does.