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The Environmental Working Group
http://www.ewg.org/
Hundreds of large facilities in auto assembly, iron
and steel, petroleum refining, pulp manufacturing, and metal smelting and
refining are threatening the public health by their repeated failure to
comply with federal clean air safeguards. Worse, there has been little
effort by state or federal officials to bring even the most flagrant
offenders into compliance with current statutory requirements.
The EWG analysis is based
upon records of compliance with air pollution standards at nearly 600
facilities in five major industries across the United States during the past
two years. These records, which were audited by polluters and state and
federal enforcement agencies, have just recently been released to the
public. They show that:
More than 39 percent (227 out of 575) of all major U.S. facilities in auto
assembly, iron and steel, petroleum refining, pulp manufacturing, and the
metal smelting and refining industries violated the CAA between January 1997
and December 1998. On average, these facilities violated the Act four out of
the eight quarters during the two-year period analyzed. All of these
infractions fit the U.S. EPA definition of "significant" violations of the
law. Only about one-third (36 percent) of the 227 facilities violating the
law have been fined by the U.S. EPA or state environmental regulators.
According to EPA, only two percent of the violations reported are paperwork
violations (EPA 1997a).
Fifty-three (53) of these major polluters were out of compliance with the
CAA every quarter during the 2-year period analyzed (Table 1). Just 20 of
these 53 facilities were subject to fines or penalties during that time.
When fines were levied, they were almost always too small to have any
deterrent effect. The average fines for a "significant violator" of the CAA
for the past two years nationwide was $318,290. The average net earnings of
the corporations that owned these facilities in 1998 were $24.2 billion
(Table 1).
In thirteen of the nineteen states with five or more violators, more than 50
percent of all facilities violating the Clean Air Act in the past two years
escaped with no fines (Table 2).
The industries with highest violation rates are petroleum refining and iron
and steel, where 41 and 31 percent of all facilities respectively are
currently classified as "significant violators" of the Clean Air Act.
Twenty-five (25) percent of metal smelting and refining facilities, 20
percent of pulp manufacturing facilities and ten percent of auto assembly
plants are also currently classified as "significant violators" as of April
1999.
Without question, the Clean Air Act is not being effectively enforced by
state environmental agencies. In turn, EPA oversight of state enforcement is
virtually non-existent. Large industrial companies are taking advantage of
the situation and the public is suffering direct health consequences as a
result. It is no wonder that year after year, the air in many major
metropolitan areas fails to meet federal health standards. In the five
industries analyzed, which represent just a fraction of all American
industry:
Forty-three (43) facilities, located in metropolitan regions that are out of
compliance with the CAA, emitted illegal levels of the very pollutant for
which the community failed to meet federal health standards (Table 3). Only
half of these facilities had been fined in the past two years by either
state or federal authorities.
Industry is Pressing for Further Rollbacks of Health Safeguards
Major progress toward existing clean air goals could be achieved with strict
enforcement of current laws and regulations. Instead, lax enforcement
encourages unsafe amounts of pollution even as major polluting industries
work for rollbacks of federal clean air standards under the guise of
"regulatory reform."
In the halls of Congress, industry portrays itself as living in fear of
onerous federal environmental regulations. Regulatory reform legislation is
offered in this context as a means to relieve the so-called burden of big
government. In truth, most of these proposals would further relax already
slack enforcement of environmental safeguards by erecting a series of
bureaucratic roadblocks in the path of nearly all federal rules to protect
the public health.
Companies will never comply with the Clean Air Act, or any environmental
law, without a real threat of punishment. There is little factual evidence
that anything other than stepped-up enforcement, larger fines, and tougher
federal government oversight will increase compliance with environmental
laws, and reduce the serious levels of air pollution that continue to plague
most metropolitan areas in the United States.
| Conclusions & Recommendations |
EWG's first ever analysis of enforcement records
audited by federal and state officials and the polluters themselves, reveals
a disturbing disregard for public health safeguards and pollution standards
that have been adopted to protect the public health from serious
environmental threats. Enforcement of the Clean Air Act is feckless and the
health protections already promised to the public by the Congress are
nowhere near being met. It is inconceivable that this level of illegal
activity would be tolerated under statutes applied to other areas of society
or commerce. The primary reason that this situation has been allowed to
continue, we believe, is that the public has not had any way to know that
the nation's clean air laws were so poorly enforced and routinely violated.
This report is a first step in what we hope is a long-term effort to educate
and involve the public in enforcement of the nation's environmental laws.
In the five industries examined, the record of compliance with the Clean Air
Act is abysmal. To remedy the problem, state and federal environmental
enforcement agencies need to vastly improve their enforcement activities.
Industry, in turn, should not operate with such an opportunistic disregard
for what it clearly knows to be rules and regulations that were designed,
with its input, to protect the public health.
Specifically, to improve compliance with the CAA:
The Congress must not pass legislation that in any way slows the
implementation and enforcement of public health standards or pollution
controls mandated under the Clean Air Act or any other environmental law.
State legislatures must limit the enforcement discretion of regulatory
agencies so that repeat violators cannot escape unpunished. Penalties for
repeat violators must be mandatory and large enough to curtail future
violations. A good example is the state of New Jersey where a "three
strikes" style environmental law has been passed to solve this problem.
Regional EPA offices should exercise their authority and intervene in cases
where state regulators don't follow EPA's new guidance on "Timely and
Appropriate Enforcement Response to High Priority Violators" and bring
persistent violators back into compliance with the CAA.
U.S. EPA should help concerned citizens participate in the development and
enforcement of air pollution permits issued under Title V of the CAA.
Regional EPA offices should monitor state implementation of Title V programs
to ensure that the compliance-related information is readily understandable
by and available to the public.
To assure that so-called audit privilege laws do not allow polluters to
avoid or delay environmental compliance and hide their records from the
public, the audit privilege laws that exist in 24 states should be repealed
and replaced with U.S. EPA's audit policy.
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