Citizens across North Carolina are calling on Gov. Pat McCrory to veto the Polluter Protection Act. This week inCIB.

Executive Watch: Veto the Polluter Protection Act!

Last week the NC General Assembly voted 73 to 39 to approve HB 765, the 2015 “rules reform” bill now widely known as the Polluter Protection Act. The fate of this egregiously anti-environment bill – and the health of North Carolinians who will be at risk if it becomes law – now rest in the hands of Gov. Pat McCrory, who has 30 days from its passage to sign or veto it.

In a joint letter to the governor urging him to veto the bill, 15 citizen conservation organizations including NCLCV said, “North Carolinians value protections that keep our families safe, build strong communities, and sustain a vibrant economy. Provision after provision of H765 threatens all of these.” The full letter with its details of the worst provisions can be read here.

NCLCV Director of Governmental Relations Dan Crawford has declared that HB 765 could be “the worst environmental bill of Gov. McCrory’s tenure.” You can help urge Gov. McCrory to veto HB 765, known as the Polluter Protection Act,by calling his office at 919-814-2000.

As we described last week, here are three of the worst provisions in this so-called “rules reform” bill:

First, there’s the explicit “polluter protection” provision. Known euphemistically as the “environmental self-audit”, this provision actually excuses permit-holders who violate environmental limits from civil penalties for their offenses, if they self-report the violations. The practical impact is to encourage carelessness by air and water pollution dischargers, since it becomes simple to get off the hook with the equivalent of a ‘whoops, sorry about that.’ It further makes the polluter’s internal investigations “privileged” – meaning that it is protected from having to release them to a civil court review or the public – further weakening the state’s ability to detect, prevent, investigate, and penalize for illegal pollution.

(As Chris Fitzsimon of NC Policy Watch puts it, “It allows companies to avoid penalties for violating environmental laws if they turn themselves in and hide evidence from communities affected by pollution who turn to the courts for help.”)

The bill again cuts back state protections for isolated wetlands and eliminates state protections for intermittent streams, which are waters that flow in an established channel but only for part of the year. Both of these types of waters (most especially the intermittent streams) are critical to protecting clean water in other streams and rivers across the state throughout the year.

The bill will require the state’s air quality protection agency to shut down many of the air quality permitting stations now in operation. What we don’t know that we’re breathing in our air can indeed still hurt us, and creating willful blind spots in our monitoring network makes effective regulation of air pollution much more difficult.

McCrory has one last chance this year to show that he has better regard for the health of North Carolinians than the dictates of ideologues who are giving the legislature its marching orders on the environment. We shall see if he takes it.

Washington Watch: EPA Toughens Ozone Limits

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week announced its final rule resetting the limits on ground-level ozone (smog), toughening the standard from 75 ppb (parts per billion) to 70 ppb. This seemingly small technical change actually represents a large shift in the allowed ambient air concentrations of this key air pollutant.

In its news release, the EPA said, “The updated standards will reduce Americans’ exposure to ozone, improving public health protection, particularly for at risk groups including children, older adults, and people of all ages who have lung diseases such as asthma.” The agency’s studies project that public health benefits of its tougher standards will reach $2.9 to $5.9 billion annually by 2025, far exceeding the estimated compliance costs of $1.4 billion.

In the new rule, EPA resets both the “primary” (protecting public health) and the “secondary” (protecting trees, plants, and ecosystems) standards to 70 ppb. It also extends the ozone monitoring season for 32 states and the District of Columbia, providing improved public warning of dangerous high ozone days on a local level. For more background on the issue, including the new standard, see the EPA’s pages here.

EPA’s selection of 70 ppb as the new standard represented something of a compromise choice. Industry lobbying campaigns argued for no strengthening of the standards, while environmental advocates pushed for even lower limits.

Around the State: Legislature Pulls the Plug on Local Fracking Rules

Momentum had been building in potentially impacted counties to adopt local moratoriums on fracking permits. Chatham adopted one earlier this year. Stokes adopted a moratorium just last week. And Lee was set to consider one this month. Both Republican and Democratic local elected officials were acting with the approval of overwhelming public support.

Naturally, this called for our overlords of the legislature to quash such popular uprisings. Thus, in one of its final “technical corrections” bills (SB 119) of the waning hours of the session, the General Assembly included provisions stating that any local rules/codes/actions “regulating” oil or gas exploration and extraction are “invalidated and unenforceable.” This replaces previous language that said only that local provisions “prohibiting” oil and gas activities could be examined and preempted by the state Mining and Energy Commission.

As observers of the legislative process noted, this provision was added literally in the dark of night when it appeared for the first time in the final version of the bill, adopted after midnight in a marathon sessions that ended at about 4am. The provision had not appeared in any earlier version of the legislation.

It appears that neither public transparency nor local public opinion is much respected by the decision-crafters of this General Assembly.

That’s our report for this week.