BACK IN MAY, I did a deep dive into the history of UNC’s coal power plant and its relationship with the local Black community. The timing of that research was sparked by the fact that the plant’s Air Permit was up for renewal while UNC was being sued for thousands of alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. Environmental activists were sounding the alarm because they’d noticed that the new Draft Air Permit had quietly dropped the heat input limit from the language of the existing Air Permit.
As I wrote then: “That would mean no enforceable cap on the amount of coal UNC could burn would exist. Presumably that would provide quite a bit more room to dodge getting sued again. Further, the section of the Draft Air Permit that extensively lists all the changes made to the permit from its previous version does not mention the deletion of the heat input limit. It’s just gone.”
Well, we now have an update to this story, and it’s not a positive one. Perrin de Jong, the Center for Biological Diversity attorney spearheading that lawsuit, wrote me this week with news about the Air Permit. It’s no longer a “draft.”
North Carolina’s Division of Air Quality approved the permit as is, in regard to the missing heat input limit. De Jong says that means “there is not a limit on the amount of coal which UNC can burn and thus no limit on the actual amount of pollution they can dump on the community.”
De Jong writes:
NC DAQ issued the final new air permit for UNC on Thursday 8/5/21. For some reason, they didn’t publicly announce that until this morning [EDIT: Monday, August 9], after we repeatedly inquired with multiple DAQ and EPA staff about why the permit (and official news of its issuance) hadn’t been released to the public yet.
In any case, the new permit lacks a heat input limit for the coal boilers… [EDIT: See Section 2.1 on Page 9 of the permit as well as the prior Stone Walls about the plant for an explainer.] Note that in that section, the limits on Sulfur dioxide and Nitrogen dioxide are based on heat input, but there is no limit on heat input itself.
Put another way, there is a limit on how much SO2 or NO2 can be emitted per unit of heat input, but there is no limit on the amount of heat input. This is kind of like your doctor putting you on a diet where you can only eat cookies that have 100 calories or less, but there is no limit on the number of cookies that you can eat. The end result is that the permit provides no effective way of regulating the total amount of SO2 and NO2 pollution emitted by UNC’s polluting facilities over time.
This result comes despite significant public outcry and local media coverage, a lengthy queue of residents who spoke against the lack of a heat input limit (and against the plant more generally) at the DAQ public hearing, and letters from the mayors of Carrboro and Chapel Hill in opposition. The Carrboro Town Council even voted on the matter while the DAQ public hearing was taking place. Sammy Slade toggled between the two remote meetings to read Carrboro’s statement in the DAQ hearing as soon as it was approved by the council.
The lawsuit against UNC over alleged violations of the Clean Air Act continues. Summary judgment oral arguments took place in June, and a trial date is set for October. The parties have been ordered to appear in court for a settlement conference on August 30.
The statement released Monday by the North Carolina Division of Air Quality regarding the approved Air Permit reads:
The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Air Quality (DAQ) has issued a renewal of the Title V air permit for The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This permitting action also consolidates three additional applications for modification of the facility.
After a comprehensive public process, including a public comment period and public hearing, and EPA Region 4 review, Division staff thoroughly considered the comments received on the draft permit and incorporated changes as recommended by the Hearing Officer. The final permit adds monitoring, recordkeeping, and reporting requirements to ensure compliance with the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides as a result of updated modeling.
The final permit, final permit review, and environmental justice report are available on the Department’s webpage here.
According to de Jong, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has 45 days to review the new Air Permit and can object to it as unlawful. If the EPA does not, the public will then have 60 days to petition the EPA to make North Carolina’s DAQ change the permit.
Coincidentally, this news came the same day the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, released its big and grim report. The IPCC’s report — which was approved by 195 member governments and has 234 authors, 517 contributing authors, and more than 14,000 cited references — concludes that “unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach.” (That’s 2.7°-3.6°F.) Earth is now warmer than it’s been in 125,000 years. The sea level rise, melting ice, wildfires, severe flooding, droughts, and extreme weather events will get worse and worse.
Whether it’s the climate emergency or racial reckoning or a pandemic, UNC has proven lately to possess a special talent for doing the opposite of what the moment calls for.
(Read Stone Walls from a year ago to learn how UNC handled the Spanish flu pandemic. Hint: It went incredibly poorly and some prominent people died.)
ONE GOOD THING:
On Monday, Carrboro unveiled its second Truth Plaque, this one outside of St. Paul A.M.E. Church where Carrboro’s and Chapel Hill’s downtowns meet. In 1866, Green Cordal and Benjamin Craig purchased an acre of land there from Craig’s former enslavers and a Freedman School was built that operated until 1917. The school building stood just past the end of Franklin Street at Merritt Mill Road where today Main Street continues on from Franklin Street. (The part of Main Street directly connecting Franklin Street to Carrboro was constructed in the 1920s when Franklin Street first got paved and Black property owners were swindled by the Town of Chapel Hill.)
The below photo shows the school building with a view looking south down along South Merritt Mill Road. Several photos and more historical detail can be found at Open Orange.