The Clean Power Plan and Environmental Justice: Part Two

Yesterday in this space, I discussed how stringent Clean Power Plan targets are critical to achieving significant aggregate co-pollutant reductions that will indirectly benefit many overburdened communities. Today, I turn to classic environmental justice issues: the distributional effects of the plan and its community engagement provisions. As I explained in my short essay in CPR's policy paper, The Clean Power Plan: Issues to Watch, it is difficult for EPA to directly control the plan's distributional effects given the realities of an interconnected grid and the states' important implementation role. Environmental justice groups had suggested that EPA require states to do an environmental justice assessment of their state implementation plans. The Plan acknowledges the importance of localized co-pollutant impacts on communities of color and low-income communities and "encourages" states to evaluate the impact of their plans of vulnerable communities and ensure that they benefit from the rule's implementation. It did not, however, require such an assessment. Nonetheless, the preamble suggests EPA's strong support for considering co-pollutant impacts in developing state implementation plans. EPA notes that states are required to engage in long-term planning to reduce criteria pollutants, and observes that: "Multi-pollutant strategies that incorporate criteria pollutant reductions ... jointly with strategies for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from affected EGUs needed to meet Clean Power Plan requirements ... may accomplish greater environmental results with lower long-term costs." The agency states that the Clean Power Plan implementation process creates an opportunity "to consider the most effective means of meeting ... obligations while limiting or eliminating localized emission increases that would otherwise affect overburdened communities."