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Technical Comments on the Regulatory Impact Analysis Supporting EPA's Proposed Rule for Utility MACT and Revised NSPS (76 FR 24976)
3 August 2011
By Dr. Anne E. Smith
On 3 May 2011, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a Proposed Rule in the Federal Register to set National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for hazardous air pollutants from coal- and oil-fired steam electric generating units (EGUs), and also to revise the New Source Performance Standards for fossil-fuel-fired electric utility, industrial-commercial-institutional, and small industrial-commercial-institutional steam EGUs. The Proposed Rule is accompanied by and frequently references a Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) that the EPA released as the basis for statements about the costs and benefits of the Proposed Rule. In this report, which was used in the formal comments submitted to the EPA docket by the Utility Air Regulatory Group, NERA Senior Vice President Dr. Anne E. Smith reviews the EPA's RIA and related EPA documents, and concludes that the EPA's argument that there is a strong cost-benefit justification for the Proposed Rule is inappropriate because it is based solely on a preponderance of co-benefits from a pollutant that is already regulated, and not an air toxic. Moreover, the estimate is almost entirely derived from changes in very low concentrations that the EPA has deemed adequately protect the public health. In the meantime, the EPA has not been able to quantify, or even clearly identify, any meaningful amount of direct benefits from the reductions in air toxics that the Proposed Rule mandates.
