Humpty loses a round.

Byline: The Register-Guard

CORRECTION (ran 3/24/2006): The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last week blocked the Bush administration's four-year effort to loosen emission rules for aging coal-fired power plants. An editorial in Wednesday's Register-Guard incorrectly identified the court.

When it comes to enforcing this nation's premier clean air law, President Bush has taken what a federal court last week aptly called a "Humpty-Dumpty" approach - interpreting the law to mean whatever he chooses.

Four years ago, the Bush administration invented an astonishing new reading of the 1970 Clean Air Act that enabled it to loosen emission rules for aging coal-fired power plants, refineries and factories. As a result, owners were allowed to upgrade these facilities without having to install advanced pollution controls that would reduce the amount of health-threatening pollution in the atmosphere.

Last Friday, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., rejected that brazen distortion of the clearly worded requirements of the Clean Air Act, saying it would make sense "only in a Humpty-Dumpty world."

When Congress approved the Clean Air Act, it grandfathered in many older power plants, refineries and factories with high levels of sulfur-dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions.

The assumption was that their age and obsolescence would force them to be retired eventually, eliminating them as pollution sources. If owners made "any physical change" to their facilities that increased emissions, however, the law required them to install state-of-the-art pollution-control equipment. These provisions prevent the dirtiest plants from operating indefinitely, without incorporating pollution-control equipment in the course of upgrades.

It was a tough and fair law that gave company owners a clear understanding of what was required of them. It encouraged the gradual replacement of aging, dirty facilities with new ones that produce less pollution.

After power companies complained to Vice President Dick Cheney's secretive energy task force about federal and regional enforcement efforts, Cheney intervened by directing the Environmental Protection Agency to find a way to both ease the compliance burden on corporations and encourage energy production.

The EPA's solution was a noxious new interpretation of the Clean Air Act: Only improvements that increased a plant's value by more than 20 percent would trigger the tighter pollution controls. Anything less than that would be regarded as "routine maintenance."

The public health consequences of this arbitrary regulatory shift were immense. Recent studies have linked pollution from coal-fired power plants to as many as 20,000 premature deaths and many more thousands of debilitating illnesses in the United States every year.

It is heartening to see a federal court hold the Bush administration accountable for the latest example of its indifference to the letter of the law. But the White House already has shown it has no intention of slackening its efforts to roll back environmental protections and is no doubt already pursuing other means of undermining the Clean Air Act.

That's to be expected from a president who believes, as Humpty Dumpty told Alice in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass": "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."