Clean Air in the News

Published on Tuesday, July 15, 2008

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Is it possible to be too big, too important to be held to standards that don’t make other people sick, degrade their living conditions and undermine one of their leading industries?

You probably won’t hear lawyers for the Tennessee Valley Authority make that argument as they go up against N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper in U.S. District Court. But that’s essentially what the federally owned utility said when first threatened with a pollution lawsuit. (It was also argued that the actions of executive-branch agencies weren’t subject to judicial review, but you won’t hear that one anymore, either.)

The question is, will TVA make a convincing case that it’s aggressively trying to stop fouling North Carolina’s air with its coal-burners, affecting residents’ health and cloaking the Great Smoky Mountains in a cloud of toxins? Or will it go on behaving as if this is some sort of contest in which it gets to continue doing as it pleases as long as it’s spending money on pollution abatement and as long as North Carolina remains a contributor to its own problem?

The authority is one entity. North Carolina is another.

The authority has a federal mandate to provide affordable electricity. It has no mandate, nor even an exemption hidden in the verbiage of the Clean Air Act, that allows it to do business at the expense of the health of thousands living (and, in a few cases, dying) downwind.

The state has its own responsibility to see to the health of its residents, and has developed an effective program for itself — one with standards that TVA is unwilling to match. The authority, citing numbers of dollars invested in pollution abatement in recent years, seems to have as its premise that nature or some higher power will keep the problems in check as long as TVA is spending enough to make a show of good intentions.

Aside from being nonsensical on its face, that approach fails a number of other tests. Not all of those investments represent efforts to address North Carolina’s problems. Of those that do, it’s possible that one or two would not even have been made had Cooper not gone bare-knuckle on the issue four years ago. And, despite all those investments, most of North Carolina’s problems are getting worse, not better.

It’s not about statistics. It’s about lungs. We North Carolinians want less crud in our bodies. Let’s hear the TVA deny that conditions in North Carolina are, in absolute terms, going the other way.