Indian tribes caught in middle
An Environmental Protection Agency appeals panel has blocked the EPA from issuing an approval permit for a Utah coal-fired electric power plant.
The panel said EPA’s Denver office failed to justify its approving the plant without stringent carbon-dioxide controls. Is the change in presidential administration already starting to produce some environmental backbones, even as EPA continues to twiddle its thumbs on specific regulations to control carbon dioxide as a pollutant, per Supreme Court ruling?
That’s the take of David Bookbinder, a lawyer representing the Sierra Club in its challenge to the Bonanza plant, which would have been built on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in eastern Utah. The “usual suspects,” including American Petroleum Institute, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Chemistry Council and the National Association of Manufacturers, wanted EPA to steam full speed ahead.
That said, the ruling will also keep particulate pollutants from the plant from wafting into Dinosaur National Monument and the High Uintahs Wilderness area.
At the same time, it will cost Ute Indians on the reservation whatever construction and operations jobs they could have gotten.
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