The Venue Shopping Strategies of Atlantic Northeast Environmental Groups: Regulating the Cooling Water Intake of Coal-Fired Power Plants

In 2011, two massive, closed-cycle cooling towers were constructed at the base of a coal-fired power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, to mitigate the plant’s contribution to the ecological problem of declining fish populations. The U.S. political system allows for policy problems like this to be solved through a variety of policymaking venues. Of these venues, this case explains how environmental stakeholders in Rhode Island and Massachusetts entered the regulatory venue and seized on the Clean Water Act’s Section 316(b) provisions to regulate the power plant’s intake of cooling water from the Mount Hope Bay. It specifically demonstrates how groups used new scientific evidence, along with the prospect of looming legal action, to convince Environmental Protection Agency administrators to use their “best professional judgment” to regulate cooling water intake from the Mount Hope Bay. A variety of lessons can be drawn from the conflict over declining fish populations along the Mount Hope Bay. This case demonstrates (1) how groups used broad federal statutes like the Clean Water Act during the Chevron Doctrine era to address externalities produced by power plants, (2) how groups mobilize law and science in the policy process, and (3) how groups engage in strategic venue shopping strategies to pursue their policy goals.