« Ind. Courts - Civil and criminal liability issues re accidental child death from sleeping with an infant | Main | Ind. Courts - "Court translation services spotty, but less so locally" »
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Environment - IDEM meetings introduce new antidegradation rules
Gitte Laasby reports today in the Gary Post-Tribune in a lengthy story:
MERRILLVILLE -- Polluters like BP would be allowed to increase pollution into Lake Michigan without justifying the increase under proposed new rules, critics say.For more information, here is IDEM's antidegradation page.Environmentalists say the proposal by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management contains so many loopholes that it allows significant amounts of pollution to escape review.
Lyman Welch, water quality program manager with the Alliance for the Great Lakes, said under the new rule, BP could argue that the increased discharges of ammonia and silty materials -- that people protested in a firestorm in 2007 -- are exempt from requirements to justify the increase.
"Our major point is that Lake Michigan should have more protection and the ... process is there to force a thorough study and analysis about whether an increase in pollution is necessary," he said. "By exempting (certain) discharges into Lake Michigan, you avoid that process entirely."
The rules aim to protect uses of Lake Michigan and other lakes and streams by setting a limit on how much additional pollution can be discharged and under what circumstances.
IDEM plans to explain the "antidegradation" rules to the public at a meeting in Portage on Wednesday, Aug. 19.
In general, the new rules would allow polluters to discharge more as long as people can still use the water for the same purposes, for instance drinking, fishing and swimming. But polluters have to show the increase is "necessary to accommodate important economic or social development."
To prove that, a polluter would have to explore whether treatments to prevent the increase would be cost effective; examine the impact of the increase on human health, fish and aesthetics; and make sure benefits such as job creation would come from the increase.
But as long as the increase is below a certain threshold, polluters would not have to go through such an analysis to justify the increase.
The insignificance threshold for Lake Michigan is 1 percent of the amount of a pollutant that the lake could handle while still allowing people to drink the water, fish and swim. For waters outside the Great Lakes basin, the threshold is 10 percent.
IDEM is required to put in an insignificance threshold because of a 2000 law passed by the General Assembly. How to set the threshold has been a matter of debate between IDEM, industry, environmentalists and municipalities over the last year and a half.
"I would like to know how did IDEM come up with 1 percent versus a tenth of a percent or a one-hundredth of a percent or some even lower standard? I don't know what scientific justification they may have for any of that," Welch said. "If BP came up again under this rule, how would IDEM treat that? If that just gets exempted, is that the result people want in Indiana?"
Environmentalists proposed setting the insignificance level at the concentration of each pollutant already present in Lake Michigan. That means polluters would have to justify any increase above that concentration. (Increases are not allowed into Great Lakes waters for bioaccumulating chemicals, such as mercury.) If the increase is justified, it would be allowed.
Industry proposed a higher insignificance level and has argued increases that wouldn't significantly lower water quality should be allowed.
"It is important that the antidegradation process be designed to ensure that worthwhile projects are not unnecessarily discouraged, impeded or even halted because that would have profound effects on business and municipal planning with adverse impacts on economic growth and on society generally with little or no benefit to water quality," the Indiana Manufacturer's Association wrote in comments to IDEM.
A group of steel mills, including ArcelorMittal and U.S. Steel, made similar remarks.
"It is critical that the rules contain appropriate (insignificance level) provisions so that minor increases are not subject to an expensive, time-consuming regulatory review by IDEM before they can be authorized," the steel makers told IDEM.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 12, 2009 08:16 AM
Posted to Environment