TexPIRG Advocate Luke Metzger speaks at a news conference outside the governor’s mansion calling for leadership from the governor on clean air enforcement.

New policies controlling pollution from industrial plants show an improvement over old standards, but continue to violate the Clean Air Act, according to an analysis by TexPIRG and our allies. TexPIRG called on Gov. Rick
Perry to close a loophole that allows polluters to evade fines if they can convince environmental officials that their excess pollution was “accidental.”

“‘Oops, I did it again’ shouldn’t cut it as an excuse for health-endangering pollution,” said TexPIRG Advocate Luke Metzger. “We need Governor Perry to take charge, round up Texas polluters, and make our air safe to breathe again.”The Clean Air Act was designed to strictly limit how much industries can pollute, but state regulators have created a hole in the law that allows polluters to escape punishment. For example, the BASF chemical plant in Port Arthur, Texas, reported 2,405,327 “accidental” pounds of pollution in 2003.

BASF’s accidental pollution levels alone made it the sixth-largest emitter of cancer-causing butadiene in the nation. Their incentive to pollute is obvious — of the 7,250 accidental emissions polluters reported in 2003, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) fined just 0.3 percent.

TCEQ’s new policies should mean less pollution by making it clear that upsets are violations of the law and allowing TCEQ to require corrective action plans of violating facilities.

Unfortunately, the policies still provide broad exceptions which encourage facilities to hire lawyers to make the problems go away, rather than hiring engineers to solve them. As TCEQ formalizes the policies into formal rules, TexPIRG will push for mandatory fines and cleaner, more efficient technologies for repeat or large offenders.