Climate, Politics, & Tea

Apologies for the long time without posting. I suspect that posting will continue to be sporadic until this semester is over …

But, I was quite excited to see the Environmental Protection Agency officially released this major announcement on Friday:

“EPA Finds Greenhouse Gases Pose Threat to Public Health, Welfare / Proposed Finding Comes in Response to 2007 Supreme Court Ruling”

After a long scientific review process, the EPA has come to the conclusion that greenhouse gases, via the climate change that they cause, pose a threat to public health and welfare. This may not come as a shock to a lot of people, but it has the very significant implication that the EPA will now be able to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. (Actually the EPA’s conclusion published yesterday is only a “proposed finding;” the “final finding” will not be released until after a public comment period, and only then could regulations be imposed).

Some background on this issue:
In 2003, the EPA Administrator decided that the EPA lacked authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and, if it did in fact have the authority, it wasn’t going to regulate them anyway. [1]. Twelve states and several cities sued the EPA over its refusal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars. The Supreme Court ruled against the EPA in April 2007 (Massachusetts v. EPA), finding that greenhouse gases are pollutants and therefore the EPA would have to regulate them under the Clean Air Act if they were found to endanger public health and welfare. The Bush EPA basically sat on this court order, dragging its feet until Bush left office.

The interesting thing about the Clean Air Act, which I was only recently made aware of, is that the legislation requires the EPA to put public health and welfare first when making regulations. That is, the economic costs don’t enter into the EPA’s pollution standards; they only enter into the second stage when deciding how to go about achieving a given reduction in pollutants. This is how the national ambient air quality standards are set for the major air pollutants (particulate matter, ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and lead). After my non-expert reading of the relevant section of the Clean Air Act, I’m pretty sure that the same situation would also apply to greenhouse gases, now that they are considered a threat to public health and welfare. Thus, I would suspect that utilities and other carbon-intensive industries would much prefer having a carbon policy imposed by Congress, where they will likely get more of a say in shaping the legislation, rather than having a mandate slapped down on them by the EPA. It will be very interesting to see if/how this new statement from the EPA will change the dynamics of the climate bill debate in Congress in the coming months.