Feds to Force Ontario to Reduce Coal-Fired Pollution
Posted on June 17th, 2009 by admin
The Governments of Canada and the United States have finalized a draft of the Ozone Annex to the 1991 U.S.-Canada Air Quality Agreement. The Ozone Annex requires fossil power plants in southern Ontario to reduce their smog-causing nitrogen oxides emissions by approximately 50 percent by 2007.
However, the Ontario government is moving in the opposite direction. The Countdown Coal report released by the Ontario Clean Air Alliance (OCAA) a few weeks prior predicted that unless the Ontario government starts to control the province’s main power producer, Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG) emissions of toxic air pollution will increase by 26 percent over the next 12 years.
Federal Environment Minister David Anderson has promised to use his authority
under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act to reduce Ontario’s electricity-related smog-causing nitrogen oxides emissions by approximately 50 percent if the Government of Ontario continues to refuse to do so. "This is fantastic news for public health in Ontario," says Jack Gibbons, Chair of the OCAA.
OPG has two options to achieve compliance with the Ozone Annex. It can install end-of-pipe pollution control equipment on its coal plants or it can convert them to natural gas, which is the preferable solution. The utility recently attempted to head off the growing consensus that all its coal-fired should be converted to cleaner-burning natural gas. It announced last month it would spend $250 million on a patchwork of cleanup measures in its three coal plants in southern Ontario. Nothing was allotted to cleaning up the two coal plants in Northern Ontario (which are not covered by the Ozone Annex).
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