Stop the Hudson cement plant
Several Berkshire organizations, most notably the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission, have been quietly fighting a planned coal-burning cement plant in neighboring Columbia County, New York. And now another group, the Tyringham-based Friends of Clean Air, has joined the legal and public-relations skirmishing that's been under way for several years and may go on for another two or three. Good luck to the opponents of this misplaced behemoth, whose 400-foot smokestack -- marginally shorter than the Washington Monument but unlikely to serve as a magnet for tourists -- would send tons of cancer-causing filth cascading into Berkshire County, 20 miles downwind of the plant.
St. Lawrence Cement, the Canadian owner of the proposed Hudson-Greenport 1,200-plus-acre spread, has a dismal environmental record, no trace of which is discernible in the roughly $50,000 worth of television and newspaper ads the company runs each month touting the plant's purported economic and even environmental benefits. The company has argued that replacing its much smaller Catskill plant with the more up-to-date facility would reduce acid rain. But it does not mention that the far more dangerous emissions of arsenic, lead and mercury would double.
St. Lawrence is acting cagey, too, about its fuel-use intentions. The company says it plans to fire its furnaces with coal -- dirtier but cheaper than natural gas -- and does not intend to burn tires, garbage or other waste "at this time." The Environmental Protection Agency, in its then-wisdom, gave the OK several years ago for cement plants to fuel their furnaces with all sorts of poisons. The agency calculated that these super-hot fires were a safe way to incinerate troublesome waste. Evidence has since accumulated, however, that the environmental hazards from these plants is considerable, yet EPA rules have not caught up to this reality. St. Lawrence now burns, or wants to burn, tires and toxic waste at half its North American plants.
Even if St. Lawrence promised to keep its fires relatively clean, skepticism is warranted. According to Friends of Clean Air, the company has been fined or suffered other legal defeats 21 times in 14 states and Canada over the past nine years.
St. Lawrence's economic-development arguments are full of holes, too. Workers would simply move across the Hudson from the Catskill operation to the more fully automated bigger Greenport plant, and the net job gain would be zip. As Friends of Hudson, a local coalition fighting the plant points out, "blighting, polluting, extractive industries hurt regional economies by driving away clean business and investment." Both Columbia and Berkshire Counties depend largely on their scenic beauty, environmental health and on "clean" businesses for their economic well-being. The St. Lawrence plant not only would do no economic good; it would likely do terrible damage.
Community groups are fighting the plant every inch of the way as it makes it way through the New York State environmental process. Friends of Clean Air is circulating a petition urging Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly to sue New York if it approves the plant. That makes sense.
New York, after all, through its Democratic Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, is taking Midwestern states to court for sending coal-burning power-plant pollution eastward on the prevailing winds. Now, unhappily, Republican Governor Pataki is endorsing similar environmental -- and economic -- mayhem. He and the St. Lawrence plant need to be stopped.
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