Environmental Regulation, Pro-Business Politics, and Disaster

The saga of Duke Power's coal ash ponds reached the conclusion environmentalists expected last month, when a spill at one of their substandard facilities dumped 39,000 tons of ash into the Dan River. The ash has already spread 70 miles down the river. Trip Gabriel of the Times wrote a good piece on the political background to all of this. The essential story is that the state's newly dominant Republican Party, and especially governor Pat McCrory, defanged the state's regulatory agencies. McCrory effectively ordered them to stop handing out fines and instead "help people through the regulatory maze." Duke Power is a notoriously aggressive company that stretched this lenience to the breaking point. The state has known since 2008 that Duke was in violation of the law at all of its North Carolina plants, but they refused to comply and the governor protected them from prosecution. As a result, nothing was done about their substandard coal ash storage until this disaster.

With coal ash in the river and all the politicians scurrying for cover, Duke Power is feeling the full weight of the law. A Federal investigation is under way, and the EPA has threatened huge fines if Duke does not get serious about bringing its facilities up to code. Just this week North Carolina finally slapped the company with fines of $25,000 a day for each of its six plants for not having Federally mandated stormwater control plans. Plus they have to clean up the first spill, which is sure to cost tens of millions if not hundreds.

Everybody hates regulations. It takes years of experience to understand the comparatively simple rules that govern my work, and I am sure the ones governing coal ash are ten times worse. But as the spill shows, there is no alternative if we want to protect ourselves. Our industries produce such huge quantities of toxic stuff that the escape of even one percent would be a catastrophe. Pro-business state legislators like to complain that the rules are too adversarial, that they assume all companies are trying to cheat. They want to switch things around so that we assume all companies are "good citizens" until proved otherwise. But not all companies are good citizens, and the ones that want to do the right thing are in competition with those who done't care. If we want a clean, safe world, we have to insist on it.