Legislation Would Expand EPA Power
Congress at times is at its best when it resists flawed proposals. The global warming legislation that will do more economic harm than environmental good is an example.
That should have put the issue to rest, but now the Environmental Protection Agency has countered the congressional action, posting an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking detailing potentially devastating regulation of the economy in the name of fighting global warming.
This raises a question of who is calling the shots in Washington, D.C.
The EPA bureaucracy appears to be trying to circumvent Congress and regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, observed Ben Lieberman, an energy and environment policy expert at The Heritage Foundation.
Appropriately, the Bush Administration let its objections be known. It allowed the ANPR to be released for comment, but EPA Administrator Steve Johnson noted the Clean Air Act originally was intended to regulate regional pollutants that caused health problems and is not the way to reduce greenhouse gases.
Lieberman said the regulatory roadmap laid out in the ANPR would result in a vast expansion of the EPA’s powers, giving the organization “unprecedented regulatory oversight into all sectors of the economy, including restaurants, hospitals, apartments, schools, shipping, trucks and farming.”
There is a 120-day comment period for interested parties “to explain why this proposal needs to be stopped,” Lieberman said.
A 2007 Supreme Court ruling held the EPA could regulate emissions of carbon dioxide from motor vehicles, but did not require the agency to change its position and find that such emissions contribute to global warming enough to endanger public health or welfare. It only required the agency to demonstrate its responses to comply with the Clean Air Act.
Yet, Lieberman said, some at the EPA read the decision as a mandate to crack down on carbon dioxide, and not only for motor vehicles. Late 2007 rumors said the agency was taking this direction.
In March, however, the EPA announced it would not begin regulating carbon dioxide but would release an ANPR letter in the spring, providing an opportunity to gather information about the consequences of various options before the agency commits to any subsequent measures.
Yet with its new ANPR the agency has “all but conceded the endangerment argument and set out a detailed roadmap for heavy-handed agency regulation,” Lieberman said. It also is ignoring caution expressed by the Senate when it defeated its climate bill last month.
Caution on the part of the federal government is justified based on the costs of proposals to limit carbon dioxide emissions — something the statute was not intended to do.
The Clean Air Act has overlapping provisions that would unleash multiple regulatory regimes for carbon dioxide, he explained. Thus, once carbon dioxide emissions are regulated from mobile sources like motor vehicles, they also must be controlled from stationary sources under the New Source Review program.
The threshold from regulation ranges from 250 to as low as 100 tons per year, a figure easily reached in the case of carbon dioxide emissions. This would make smaller buildings subject to new and onerous NSR requirements previously limited to major industrial facilities.
Even the kitchen in a restaurant, the heating system in an apartment building or activities involved in running a farm could cause these and other entities — potentially a million or more — to face unprecedented requirements when they are built or modified.
Comment should be loud and clear on this EPA rulemaking proposal — it badly oversteps the agency’s authority.
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