EPA coal-ash proposal was weakened in response to concerns of coal and electric industries

The Environmental Protection Agency backed off its initial decision to designate coal ash as a hazardous waste after the White House Office of Management and Budget's review of the original proposal. The proposal was changed "to give equal standing to an alternative favored by the coal industry and coal-burning electric utilities," Patrick Reis of Greenwire reports for The New York Times. You can read our post from last week about the proposal, which opens two different options for public comment. The first option "would set binding federal disposal requirements for the ash, and the second would label the ash nonhazardous and leave enforcement to the states," Reis writes.

In its original proposal EPA said leaving coal ash classified as nonhazardous "would not be protective of human health and the environment," but the agency says Administrator Lisa Jackson changed her mind during the six months the proposal was being considered by OMB, Reis reports. "After extensive discussions, the administrator decided that both the options merited consideration for addressing the formidable challenge of safely managing coal ash disposal," EPA said in a statement.

"In its deliberations on the rule, OMB had more than 40 meetings with stakeholders, 30 with industry groups and at least 12 with environmental and public health groups, according to office's records," Reis writes. "OMB declined to comment on the matter, referring questions to EPA." Opponents of the nonhazardous option said OMB bullied EPA into the two-way approach. "OMB is substituting its judgment for the judgment of the EPA administrator, and that's not the way this is supposed to work," Rena Steinzor, president of the Center for Progressive Reform and a professor at the University of Maryland Law School, told Reis. "Lisa Jackson is accountable for environmental protection and that she could be overruled by a bunch of economists in the basement of the executive office tells us that this process is frighteningly dysfunctional." (Read more)