RALEIGH, N.C. -- Dirty air drifting across the borders of North Carolina will hurt its health and economy unless the federal government forces surrounding states to reduce pollution from power plants, state leaders said during a hearing Wednesday. "Our state is one of the fastest growing and the most naturally diverse in the United States," Attorney General Roy Cooper told the three-member panel from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "Our mountains and beaches bring the visitors, and our universities, technology and industries draw the residents. Without clean air the innovation and natural beauty are ruined." More than 30 North Carolina counties already miss federal air quality standards, said state officials, who blame much of the haze that lingers over the state's mountains and metropolitan areas on out-of-state emissions. As a result, levels of the dangerous metal mercury have increased in water and fish, while residents with respiratory problems have increased difficulty breathing. The EPA has called for reducing interstate pollution from power plants and given states in the East, South and Midwest until September 2006 to submit plans for how they'll do it. But the proposal falls short, critics said. The plan gives polluting states until 2015 to reduce pollution, "putting North Carolina citizens at risk of exposure of high levels of upwind pollution" for an extended period, according to Environmental Defense. "Postponing these things ... is the same thing as putting a noose around my neck," said Vaughn Nowlin, who moved from Dallas to Franklin County several years ago because of respiratory problems. North Carolina filed a petition with the EPA in March 2004 asking the federal government to force other states to reduce their emissions from coal-fired plants, arguing that North Carolina can't meet federal air quality standards if 13 upwind states don't cut down their pollution. The EPA proposes denying the state's petition, saying the new guidelines "will satisfy North Carolina's petition," according to an EPA statement. The EPA says it will only step in to curb soot caused by out-of-state plants but not smog. The agency says its analyses show that upwind states don't contribute to smog in North Carolina. "The programs already on the books, we think, are going to bring -- primarily Charlotte -- into attainment" by 2010, EPA official Joe Paisie said during a break Wednesday. North Carolina in 2002 adopted its own law, the Clean Smokestacks Act, requiring actual cuts in harmful emissions from in-state power plants without allowing them to trade emissions credits with other plants, as the EPA proposes. The federal proposal also could weaken the state's effort to clean up its own air, Cooper has argued. "Trading can be an effective way to reduce overall emissions, but unchecked trading can create hotspots-places where the air actually gets worse instead of better," Cooper said. "What we fear is that North Carolina's landmark efforts to clean our own air have excused other states from doing the same."
Source: The Associated Press
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