I owe every reader an apology for the title of this post. I detest rhymes, but after coming up with the above monstrosity, everything else I could come up with sounded like a desperate and obvious attempt not to rhyme.

Anyway, after the failure of the Bush’s Clear Skies initiative this may no longer be relevant, but through all of the commotion I've mainly heard people attacking Clear Skies for its mercury trading scheme and its failure to regulate carbon emissions, and I wanted to set a few things straight. There is no doubt that mercury trading is a terrible idea - you won’t find anyone who knows anything about chemistry who will disagree with you on that. As far as carbon emissions, it’s obviously a serious problem that they’re unregulated in the United States, but I don’t believe this bill would have been an appropriate place to introduce carbon regulation.

I’ll do my best to post a follow-up another day with details on emissions trading and carbon regulation, but what I want to talk about now is how the Bush administration flat out lied about what the Clear Skies initiative would have really done.

The EPA, in trumpeting Clear Skies, offers a fact sheet that says:

Clear Skies is a mandatory program that would dramatically reduce and cap emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOX), and mercury from electric power generation to approximately 70% below 2000 levels.

This is absolutely true. But immediately afterward they claim:

Clear Skies would provide health benefits faster, more certainly and at less cost to America's consumers than would the current Clean Air Act.

Except perhaps for “at less cost,” the above is completely false. There’s a table in the above fact sheet that shows the proposed pollution limits under Clear Skies, but in order to assess Clear Skies against the Clean Air Act, you need to see that table amended to include both pieces of legislation:

The above is adapted from the tables on the EPA Clear Skies “fact”sheet and at Clean the Air. One thing you might notice is that the current limits under the Clean Air Act are stricter and will go into effect several years sooner than the second phase of cuts under Clear Skies would have. Another is that the second phase of reductions under Clear Skies (the ones cited by the EPA for their deceptive claims about Clear Skies) is optional.

Recently, only a couple days after the Clear Skies initiative failed in committee, the EPA promulgated its own new set of pollution limits. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any specific numbers as to how these new limits compare to those established under the Clean Air Act, and every article I’ve seen lists them only as percentages of 2003 levels, which only further confuses things. Until I know better though, precedent dictates that I should assume these levels are less strict than the previous limits, and that the use of yet another base year is an attempt to deceive the public into thinking that these rules represent positive environmental change.