Clean Air Update

A proposed clean air rule received considerable feedback from stakeholders which has caused the Department of Ecology to take a closer look at their proposal. Sarah Rees, Special Assistance on Climate Change Policy with the Washington Department of Ecology says they were very open to the comments.
REES: When we proposed this rule back in January, we were real clear with everybody that we were looking at that as a markup version and we really wanted to engage with specific stakeholders in the environmental community, in the business community and find out what are some of the concerns, what are some of the issues, other areas we need to put more thought into this, other areas where we have not hit the mark and we’ve been having those discussions on-going and we’re going to continue to have those discussions
Rees says they were open to making recommended changes and reissuing a new proposal.
REES: Where not sure exactly what the changes are that we’re going to make but we’re going to be making some changes and so we wanted to do that and give people notice that we were going to be putting out a new version of the proposal especially as we have public hearings we’ve scheduled later in March and we wanted to make sure we gave people enough notice
Good news for the ag industry.
REES: In our proposal, greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural practices we’re not included so they were not part of the rule-making at all. There’s some ways in which folks in the agricultural community could have participated in the rule by generating credits for example but the changes we’re looking at are more in response to what we’re hearing from our industry stakeholders.
And that’s Washington Ag Today. I’m Greg Martin, thanks for listening on the Ag Information Network of the West.