Potential Federal Regulations - Good For The Environment, Bad For Business?

It’s that familiar tension between business interests and environmental interests: environmental regulations will be too harsh for businesses to continue to turn a profit, but not regulating pollution puts us all at risk. This time the focus is on harmful emissions from industrial incinerators and boilers – like the biomass boilers used by some local businesses. A story in The Olympian today lays out the situation:

Calling the plan to delay the regulations “a no-cost jobs bill,” freshman Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler said that if Congress failed to act, pulp mills, paper mills and others that couldn’t afford to upgrade their boilers “will all shed … thousands of jobs” in her district in southwest Washington state.

Reflecting the issue’s sensitivity in the Northwest, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon joined a bipartisan group in July in proposing to put the brakes on the EPA, saying its new rules would “stymie the burgeoning biomass energy industry and make it very difficult for existing lumber and wood products mills to operate.”

Much is at stake for Washington state, one of the nation’s largest producers of biomass power.

With millions of dollars in subsidies and federal grants, at least a dozen biomass plants in the state are producing power from wood byproducts from mills and waste from forests.

One of them, Simpson Tacoma Kraft Co., a forest products company in Tacoma, Wash., generates electricity by boiling water to burn sawdust, bark and wood shavings from pulp mills and sawmills, sending the high-pressure steam into a turbine. The company declined to comment on the legislation.

The description of the Simpson Kraft process may be a little off, but you get the gist; The argument on one side is that imposing these regulations will crush businesses required to comply, and threaten to send unemployment figures higher. The other side argues that the pollution from these boilers is very real, and upgrades should not wait (see the article in The Olympian for some pretty big numbers). As with so many debates, we have to wonder if maybe it’s not an either/or kind of situation. Perhaps there’s another way to consider things.

The House passed 15 month delay on tighter regulations, but it may be destined for a presidential veto. Whether now or later, it sounds like this is going to happen. A lot can change in 15 months, and there is the possibility that the regulations may not be implemented, but maybe we shouldn’t be playing the “will-it-or-won’t-it game. Maybe this time can best be used by exploring options based on the accepting of the value of environmentally friendly practices – regardless of regulations.

In an ideal world business and environmental groups would be able to see this as an opportunity for local businesses to take the lead in innovative techniques that decrease harmful outputs, while allowing for continued production of power. Tagro recently won an award for managing biosolids – another potential environmental threat – and turning them instead into a positive business model. Is it too much to think that this kind of innovation might be possible in this case too?