Timely

So it looks like, despite what I said in the proposal I turned in today, there is actually some recent activity on the coal-haze issue.  The Deseret News reports that a consortium of environmental groups, including the National Parks Conservation Association, the Sierra Club and the Grand Canyon Trust, have petitioned the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior to declare that emissions from the Four Corners Power Plant in Fruitland, New Mexico are causing poor visibility in protected lands, including National Parks and National Forests, in the region.  The article is short and doesn’t give much context for this, but it presumably involves the ongoing process the EPA is using to determine how best to handle the haze issue at Four Corners and the Navajo Generating Station in Page, Arizona.  The NPCA has a press release on its website, which the Deseret News article seems to have largely copied verbatim, giving a little more background on which groups are associated with this effort and how they see the situation, but it’s equally vague on what exactly this action means in the context of the EPA decision-making process.  The petition seems to be asking USDA and DOI to declare that Four Corners is violating the Clean Air Act by causing reduced visibility in areas under their jurisdiction, but it’s not really clear what authority they have to do that.  It certainly seems like the EPA has to make the final judgment on whether the level of haze violates the CAA, and since it has already put out an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on the issue it seems like it has probably already decided that it does.  The extended period for comment on the ANPR passed months ago, and EPA doesn’t seem to have done anything further since then, as far as I can tell.  The role of the other agencies is presumably to contribute their knowledge of the situation as land managers, but it’s not clear to me from either the press release or the article how they are supposed to do that or what stage of the rulemaking process is the appropriate time for it.  There are some puzzles in this, but it’s interesting and makes me more comfortable with choosing this topic to analyze.