Opinion ID: 785093
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Track II

Text: 17 Under the Rule, a new facility has a choice between complying with the velocity and capacity requirements of Track I and implementing alternative technologies (for instance, screens that prevent fish from being entrained) that yield comparable results. By comparable the Rule means either attaining at least 90 percent of the reduction in impingement mortality and entrainment that Track I would yield or maintaining a substantially similar level of wildlife in the water where the intake system is located, as shown by a [c]omprehensive [d]emonstration [s]tudy. 40 C.F.R. § 125.86(c)(2). The EPA argues that the two-track system — which is a variation on a rule that industry proposed — gives facilities a choice between a fast track with easy EPA approval and a more flexible (but more complicated) permitting process. See Final Rule, 66 Fed.Reg. at 65,270-72. The Environmental Petitioners object that Track II violates the Clean Water Act by allowing compliance either with a lower standard than that compelled by the best technology available or through restoration measures that are unrelated to the location, design, construction, and capacity of cooling water intake structures that the EPA is charged with regulating. Moreover, the Environmental Petitioners continue, because either method requires a demonstration study, Track II involves precisely the sort of site-specific, case-by-case determination that Congress moved away from in the 1972 amendments when it chose a national, technology-based standards regime.
18 By requiring a standard based on the best technology available, the Clean Water Act appears to contemplate a single level of performance applicable to all facilities. The Environmental Petitioners contend that Track II violates this aspect of section 316(b) by allowing facilities to demonstrate only 90 percent of the reduction in impingement and entrainment that Track I would accomplish, instead of requiring an equivalent reduction in impingement and entrainment. 19 The EPA agrees that Tracks I and II must reflect the same standard, but it contends that 10 percent is an acceptable margin of error for measuring reductions in impingement and entrainment. As it wrote in the preamble to the Rule: 20 EPA does not consider this requirement to mandate exactly the same level of reduction in impingement and entrainment as would be achieved under Track I. Rather, given the numerous factors that must be considered to determine the required level of reduction in impingement and entrainment for Track II and the complexity inherent in assessing the level of performance of different control technologies, EPA believes it is appropriate for a new facility following Track II to achieve reductions in impingement and entrainment that are 90 percent or greater of the levels achieved under Track I. 21 Final Rule, 66 Fed.Reg. at 65,279. 15 Measurements of organism impingement and entrainment are necessarily inexact estimates based on available data as well as certain assumptions. Id. The EPA can only predict the effect of a proposed Track II approach at a new facility based on empirical results at other facilities, but the data on which the EPA relies in reaching those estimates comes from a variety of sources ( e.g., studies at multiple plants using different methods at different periods of time, interviews, on-site visits, literature searches), and the underlying studies themselves contain only estimates of technological performance that is bound to vary according to site-specific conditions. See Eng'g & Analysis Div., U.S. Envtl. Prot. Agency, Technical Development Document for the Final Regulations Addressing Cooling Water Intake Structures for New Facilities, Pub. No. EPA-821-R-01-036, at 5-1 to 5-2, 5-5 (2001) [hereinafter TDD ]. Sampling errors and natural fluctuations in animal populations further skew the results: The number of fish impinged at the same intake points at the same plants, withdrawing the same amount of water at the same speed, will not be equal on any two days, see, e.g., Carole D. Goodyear, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Serv., Evaluation of 316(b) Demonstration: Detroit Edison's Monroe Power Plant, Admin. Rep. No. 83-3, at 11, 13-16, 28 (1978), and animal populations in the water surrounding the intake point will oscillate from year to year for a variety of reasons unrelated to the intake structure, see Eugene P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology 188-95 (3d ed.1971). As a result, when predicting whether one approach will have the same effect in reducing impingement and entrainment as Track I's capacity and velocity limits, the EPA must necessarily account for all of those variables. 22 The Environmental Petitioners do not contend that 10 percent is an unreasonable margin of error to use in measuring compliance. Rather, they argue that the EPA should not have accounted for any measurement error by adjusting the underlying standard to 90 percent. The logic of their position suggests that they would not object if the EPA required equivalent (instead of comparable) reductions in impingement and entrainment in Track II but indicated elsewhere in the Rule that a facility could demonstrate such equivalence within (plus or minus) 10 percent. The distinction between those two options is lost on us, however, for we discern no significance in the location of the 10 percent provision in the Rule, or whether the Rule requires 90 percent compliance instead of allowing a 10 percent margin of error. We recognize that the EPA, consistent with Congress's intention that there be a national standard governing the discharge of pollutants, must promulgate precise effluent limitations under sections 301 and 306, for example, 40 milligrams of suspended solids per liter, or 30,000 parts per million of toxic pollutants. See Natural Res. Def. Council, Inc. v. U.S. EPA, 863 F.2d 1420, 1431-32 (9th Cir.1988); Cal. & Hawaiian Sugar, 553 F.2d at 285; Hooker, 537 F.2d at 623-24, 630. But Congress did not intend the EPA to leave industry with only one means of reducing adverse environmental impact, viz. reducing capacity and velocity, just as it did not intend to bind industry's hand by requiring particular types of effluent reducing technology. Because impingement and entrainment, unlike pollutant concentration and the velocity and volume of water, cannot always be measured directly and with mathematical precision, the use of any alternative technologies would require the EPA to make a judgment call as to whether those technologies yield results equivalent to Track I's. We think it was reasonable for the EPA to make clear in the regulation how much ambiguity it is willing to tolerate in measuring compliance and what it considers a reasonable margin of error in comparing the performance of different technologies. 16 23
24 The other means of complying with Track II is more troubling. A facility may consider impacts other than impingement mortality and entrainment provided that the measures taken will maintain the fish and shellfish in the waterbody at a substantially similar level to that which would be achieved through the velocity and capacity limits of Track I. 40 C.F.R. § 125.86(c)(2)(ii). Suggested measures include restocking fish killed by a cooling water system with those bred in a hatchery or improving the habitat surrounding the intake structure. Final Rule, 66 Fed. Reg. at 65,280-81. Under this approach, it does not matter how many organisms a facility entrains or impinges provided it takes other steps that compensate for those losses in the ecosystem. 25 This is plainly inconsistent with the statute's text and Congress's intent in passing the 1972 amendments. Section 316(b) instructs the EPA to minimiz[e] adverse environmental impact by regulating the location, design, construction, and capacity of cooling water intake structures. Reclaiming abandoned mines to reduce acid mine drainage into the waterbody, removing barriers to fish migration, and creating buffers to reduce destructive runoff from agricultural lands, Final Rule, 66 Fed.Reg. at 65,280, however beneficial to the environment, have nothing to do with the location, the design, the construction, or the capacity of cooling water intake structures, because they are unrelated to the structures themselves. Restoration measures correct for the adverse environmental impacts of impingement and entrainment; they do not minimize those impacts in the first place. 26 Restoration measures resemble the pre-1972 approach to water pollution, which regulated point sources based on their effect on the surrounding water and allowed sources to discharge pollutants provided the discharge did not cause water quality to dip below an acceptable level. See CPC Int'l, Inc. v. Train, 515 F.2d 1032, 1034-35 (8th Cir.1975). Similarly, restoration measures would allow a facility, at least in theory, to impinge and entrain unlimited numbers of organisms provided that other steps maintained acceptable water quality, here measured by wildlife levels as opposed to pollutant concentration. But [i]t was ... dissatisfaction with water quality standards as a method of pollution control that led to the proposal that they be replaced or supplemented with `effluent limitations.' Bethlehem Steel Corp. v. EPA, 538 F.2d 513, 515 (2d Cir.1976). A plaintiff attempting to prove a violation of the Clean Water Act faced a virtually unbridgeable causal gap, CPC, 515 F.2d. at 1035, for the burden of proving that a particular polluter had caused the water quality to dip below the standards was all but impossible to satisfy, Bethlehem Steel, 538 F.2d at 515. Allowing compliance through restoration measures would involve exactly the same hurdles. As the EPA itself recognized in the preamble to the Rule, 27 [B]ecause of the complexity of biological studies, it is very difficult to assess the cause and effect of cooling water intake structures on ecosystems or on important species within an ecosystem.... [U]nlike in the laboratory, where conditions are controlled, a multitude of confounding factors make biological studies very difficult to perform and make causation, in particular, difficult to determine. 28 66 Fed.Reg. at 65,285 (emphasis added); accord id. at 65,314 ([R]estoration measures... require complex and lengthy planning, implementation, and evaluation of the effects of the measures on the populations of aquatic organisms or the ecosystem as a whole.) We think the EPA's own findings reveal that restoration measures are inconsistent with Congress's intent that the design of intake structures be regulated directly, based on the best technology available, and without resort in the first instance to water quality measurements. 29 Further textual support that restoration measures are not an acceptable means of minimizing the adverse environmental impact of intake structures lies in section 316(a), 33 U.S.C. § 1326(a), which allows the EPA to vary the heat pollution standards applicable to a point source by considering the particular receiving waterbody's capacity to dissipate the heat and preserve a balanced, indigenous wildlife population. This is a notable exception to the Clean Water Act, which, as described above, otherwise relies on limitations on what a source can put into the water, not the ultimate effect of that discharge. See Weyerhaeuser Co. v. Costle, 590 F.2d 1011, 1043 (D.C.Cir.1978). That Congress provided for a water quality standards approach to thermal discharges but did not include that approach (or make any reference to it) in the very next subsection, counsels against including restoration measures within the best technology available. Cf. Bates v. United States, 522 U.S. 23, 29-30, 118 S.Ct. 285, 139 L.Ed.2d 215 (1997) ([W]here Congress includes particular language in one section of a statute but omits it in another section of the same Act, it is generally presumed that Congress acts intentionally and purposely in the disparate inclusion or exclusion. (internal quotation marks omitted)). 30 Finally, although we decline to put much weight on congressional inaction and so-called subsequent legislative history, see Hagen v. Utah, 510 U.S. 399, 418-20, 114 S.Ct. 958, 127 L.Ed.2d 252 (1994), we note that Congress rejected a proposed amendment to section 316(b) that would have explicitly allowed restoration measures. In 1982, the EPA proposed changes that, in the words of the then-deputy administrator, would allow [existing] dischargers to use measures equal in effect to the best technology available — like a fish hatchery — to mitigate adverse effects. Clean Water Act Amendments of 1982: Hearings on S. 777 & S. 2652 Before the Subcomm. on Envtl. Pollution of the Comm. on Env't and Pub. Works, U.S. Senate, 97th Cong., 2d Sess. 113-14 (1982) [hereinafter Hearings ] (testimony of Dr. John W. Hernandez, Jr., EPA Deputy Administrator). The EPA argued that the proposed amendment 17 was necessary because [t]he existing statutory language is very restrictive in that it authorizes only one option, best technology available, to mitigate such problems. Id. at 114. Although the EPA is not bound by its prior statutory interpretation, in the absence of any reasoned analysis for its change of position, Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Ass'n of the United States, Inc. v. State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co., 463 U.S. 29, 42, 103 S.Ct. 2856, 77 L.Ed.2d 443 (1983), 18 we think the EPA's prior understanding of its authority under the statute supports our own. Moreover, the fact that the proposed amendment never passed is marginal evidence that Congress rejected the EPA's request for the very authority it now seeks. Cf. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters., 471 U.S. 539, 561, 105 S.Ct. 2218, 85 L.Ed.2d 588 (1985) (relying on congressional rejection of proposed amendments). 31 Accordingly, we find that the EPA exceeded its authority by allowing compliance with section 316(b) through restoration methods, and we remand that aspect of the Rule.
32 Finally, the Environmental Petitioners argue that Track II gives permit writers unbridled discretion that amounts to a continuation of the best professional judgment standard that has applied in the absence of applicable regulations. Although lodged against both compliance options under Track II, this objection focuses on restoration measures, which we have already determined contradict the plain meaning of the Clean Water Act. We do not believe that permit writers have excessive discretion to determine whether an approach proposed under Track II will achieve at least 90 percent of the reduction in impingement and entrainment that compliance with Track I would yield. Although that determination may be harder to make than one involving judgments about the volume, capacity, and proportionality of water intake, it is no more discretionary. Accordingly, we reject this aspect of the Environmental Petitioners' appeal.