WASHINGTON — Dealing a sharp setback to the Bush administration, a federal appeals court Friday threw out a controversial regulation in the federal government's clean-air program that would have allowed older factories, refineries and power plants to install new equipment without using the most modern anti-pollution devices.
The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which decides some of the most far-reaching cases dealing with federal regulations, said the Environmental Protection Agency had relied on "Humpty Dumpty" reasoning in arriving at a rule that critics said would have eased enforcement of a law intended to reduce industrial air pollution.
If the regulation were allowed to take effect, the court said, "a law intended to limit increases in air pollution would allow sources operating below applicable emission limits to increase significantly the pollution they emit without government review."
California and 13 other states had challenged the EPA ruling.
The Clean Air Act requires major industrial sites that modernize their equipment to install the most modern pollution-reducing devices. But in August 2003, the Bush administration altered enforcement of the regulation to allow companies to avoid installing the most expensive new emissions-cutting equipment if the price of the modernization was less than 20% of what it would cost to replace a major component of the plant. In California, whose air pollution rules are among the strictest in the nation, it takes less pollution to count as a major emitter than elsewhere. Many smaller facilities, among them some auto body paint shops, bakeries and small-parts manufacturers, fall into that category and come under the regulation.
Manufacturers, power plant operators and others had worked for years to win the revision in a section of the law known as "new source review." Almost as soon as it was announced, it faced legal challenges. Since then, court actions have chipped away at the administration's relaxation of the landmark 1970 law that has cleaned up some of the nation's worst air pollution. In December 2003, the appeals court here stayed enforcement of the administration's revision.
Last June, the court delivered a divided verdict on the measure. It upheld the rule change itself, but it decided that the EPA had erred in declaring that power plants and other large polluters did not have to keep records of their emissions. It concluded that without the documentation, regulators would not know whether the facilities were breaking clean-air laws.
