Friday, June 08, 2012

EPA Official Showers Love on Anti-Fossil Fuel Activists

This time it’s Region 5 Administrator Susan Hedman, a veteran attorney who has litigated environmental cases as part of the University of Maryland Environmental Law Center, as counsel for the Environmental Law and Policy Center, and as senior assistant attorney general in the Illinois Attorney General’s office. Last August she joined dozens of activists outside her Chicago office to celebrate the expected implementation of EPA’s Mercury Air Toxics Standard, which was released in December. Bloomberg reported that the rule would cost utilities an estimated $9.6 billion per year in compliance costs, fulfilling the president’s campaign promise to make electricity costs “necessarily skyrocket.” “We really appreciate your enthusiastic support for this rule,” Hedman gushed before a crowd of 90-or-so eco-activists. “It’s quite literally a breath of fresh air compared with what’s going on in the nation’s capital these days,” she added, referring to a “tough political climate” for EPA. Region 5 covers Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Among the groups represented at the rally, which gathered on the final day EPA accepted public comments on the rule (as though comments would change anything), were Union of Concerned Scientists, Sierra Club, Environment Illinois and several others. Health care representatives also participated, claiming the Clean Air Act that the rule would amend achieved data-specific milestones that are unverifiable. “Thank you especially for this last group of comments coming in on the last day of our comment period on the new (MATS),” Hedman said in a congratulatory tone, holding up a huge stack of papers. “Really (emphasis hers) appreciate these. We’ll review these comments along with the other 600,000 comments that we’ve received in Washington, and we plan to have a final rule issued by November.” Watch the video – do you think Hedman would have behaved similarly if groups of coal and utility workers held a publicity stunt about their own MATS comments in front of her Chicago office? Would you consider her, and EPA in general, a fair evaluator of all the comments they received on MATS?...more

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