Coal plant pollution threatens U.S. parks - report

By Timothy Gardner

NEW YORK, May 15 (Reuters) - U.S. regulators are proposing to weaken air quality laws, which would allow new coal-fired power plants to pollute U.S. parks from Shenandoah in Virginia to the Great Basin in Nevada, a new report said on Thursday.

Amid rising power demand and flat U.S. natural gas output, electricity generators are seeking to build power plants fired by abundant coal.

The fuel is cheap compared with other fossil fuels, but emits more pollutants, such as mercury and smog components sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, as well as the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

"President George Bush's administration is responding to this growing threat to our national parks by seeking to weaken and rewrite the laws that protect national park air quality," Mark Wexler, the clean air director for the National Parks Conservation Association, a Washington-based advocacy group, said by telephone.

The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed refinements in so-called New Source Review rules that would change the way air pollution is calculated, allowing manipulation by industries seeking pollution permits, the NPCA said.

The changes would enable electricity generators, for example, to hide pollution spikes on hot days when their units typically run hardest.

Complaints that the revisions would harm park air quality have been underscored by U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, who wrote to the EPA this year urging Administrator Stephen Johnson to abandon the proposed rule change.

The EPA did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the report. In the past, it has said that the rules would provide greater regulatory certainty.