Corbett Worries EPA Regs Would Cost Pennsylvania Jobs

Scott Detrow

Recent Stories

Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

October 12, 2011 | 2:57 PM

Scott Detrow / StateImpact Pennsylvania

Governor Corbett tours Pittsburgh's Carpenters Training Center

Citing a potential economic impact of $11 billion, the Corbett Administration is asking President Obama to scale back new EPA air quality standards.
More from the Post-Gazette.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett is one of 11 Republican governors who have signed a letter to President Barack Obama, asking him to withdraw proposed rules that would reduce toxic pollutant emissions from coal-burning power plants.
In their letter Oct. 7, the governors claim long-delayed rules limiting emissions of mercury and other toxics — originally mandated in the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 — would cost $11 billion annually, risk millions of jobs, hurt electric power reliability and result in only marginal air quality improvements.
“Any new rule must reflect information on how it will impact the economy and include a full and complete study of reliability that takes into account the additional regulatory hurdles EPA is considering placing before the power sector,” the governors wrote.
But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is under a Nov. 16 court-ordered deadline to enact the new air toxics rules, said the standard would reduce emissions of mercury, arsenic, other heavy metals and acid gases by 91 percent and, by 2016, save 17,000 lives a year while reducing asthma, respiratory ailments, birth defects and cancers.