It’s “really a business choice by the owner.”
Today’s Wall Street Journal report, “Coal Power Is Facing End of Era,” concludes (in the print edition) with this sentence:
A senior EPA official, who spoke on condition he not be identified, said the agency doesn’t order plants to shut down—they are fined for noncompliance, instead, when not meeting emissions standards — so “making a decision not to retrofit a plant is really a business choice by the owner.”
Since EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has also publicly uttered that cynicism, we don’t know why the EPA official wanted to remain anonymous — except that such contempt for the public is quite shameful.
No household, business or factory should ever be forced to retrofit to upgraded standards. If they met the standards when being built then those same standards must apply for the entire life of the factory.
Public pressure might be applied to shame them into it if it’s something like an old coal-fired generation facility that is belching black smoke and covering everything for miles around but that should be the extent that it can go…no forced changes!
When Prohibition was repealed, the prohibitionists said: “If we can’t make drinking illegal, we will pass so many regulations that it becomes impossible.” Government has taken their advice very seriously.
The US government similar to CA never orders small businesses to shut down, it just creates regulations and taxes to put you out of business. And if you do not abide by the regulations, you have no other choice but to close your business or pay a fine, which will eventually put you out of business anyway. Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
Same sort of situation in a close-by town. There was a family-owned restaurant which was established nearly 100 years ago. It was originally just outside town, and was in an old converted adobe house. Nothing fancy, just good decent food. Then the town expands, and eventually includes this restaurant. Now, the restaurant had put in a fire-suppression sprinkler system many years before. But the rules had changed, and they were told they needed to upgrade their system. The cost would be well over $100,000, which this business just didn’t have. They were told they could either upgrade, or pay hefty fines. They decided to do neither. They closed the restaurant, putting about a dozen non-family workers out of work. They didn’t need the upgrade, the old system was quite capable, but the sprinkler heads were slightly further apart than the new spec called for.
So, what happens if the owner chooses not to pay the fines?