Illinois To Sue EPA For Exempting Foxconn Plant From Pollution Controls (reuters.com)

Last week, Reuters reported that "Illinois' Attorney General said she plans to sue the EPA for allowing a proposed Foxconn plant in neighboring Wisconsin to operate without stringent pollution controls." From the report: On Tuesday, the EPA identified 51 areas in 22 states that do not meet federal air quality requirements for ozone, a step toward enforcing the standards issued in 2015. An exempted area was Racine County, Wisconsin, just north of the Illinois border that is known to have heavily polluted air, where Taiwan-based Foxconn is building a $10 billion liquid-crystal display plant. Pollution monitoring data show the county's ozone levels exceed the 70 parts per billion (ppb) limit. If Racine County had been designated a "non-attainment" area, it would have required Foxconn to install stringent pollution control equipment.

Attorney General Lisa Madigan said she would file a lawsuit in the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the EPA's ozone designations, saying its failure to name Racine County a "non-attainment" area puts people at risk. "Despite its name, the Environmental Protection Agency now operates with total disregard for the quality of our air and water, and in this case, the U.S. EPA is putting a company's profit ahead of our natural resources and the public's health," Madigan said in a statement.

Comments

Re:Lisa Madigan

[pots]

She is. Whew, glad she meets your approval. It'd be a shame if she did one thing to protect the people of her state without also doing every other thing you can think of first.

Re:Jobs not important?

[DRJlaw]

Whoosh. Is your problem with reading comprehension or retention? The greater Chicago area is the cause of much of the pollution in surrounding areas, including coastal Wisconsin and Michigan. Lacking the windborne pollution originating in Illinois and Indiana, there's no reason to believe Racine county would have any sort of issue. No reason to force Racine to mitigate Chicago's pollution. And it's disingenuous and hypocritical for Illinois to sue claiming Wisconsin might cause more pollution.

You mean, no reason beyond the fact that high levels of ozone are a health threat, so that adding to already high levels of ozone increases the health threat, and local sources of ozone generating emissions will have an even greater impact upon ozone levels that remote sources of such emissions.

You mean, it's hypocritical to expect Wisconsin to follow the Clean Air Act, which requires controls whether or not those emissions are local or imported, merely because every other county in the U.S. has to follow that law.

You mean that a plant located within 5 miles of the shore (something about a need to divert 6 millions gallons of water per day from Lake Michigan for industrial use, in violation of the Great Lakes Compact) is not within "an extremely narrow band that follows Wisconsin's shoreline."

Fine. You can argue all of that. In court.