CPR Member Scholar Nina Mendelson has a piece today in The New York Times's "Room for Debate" feature on the news that EPA is working its way toward regulating carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act. As The Times quite directly and correctly puts it, "Under orders from the Supreme Court, which the Bush administration ignored, President Obama’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to determine" whether CO2 should be regulated. Among those joining the Times debate is John Graham, former Bush administration "regulatory czar." (He's opposed to regulating, not surprisingly.) Mendelson writes:
The announcement by Lisa Jackson, the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, that she will determine whether greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare seems a welcome signal that the agency will respond to the urgency of global warming. As a legal matter, Ms. Jackson probably has little choice. The E.P.A. has been charged for decades with regulating air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. As the Supreme Court recognized in Massachusetts v. the Environmental Protection Agency, greenhouse gases are such air pollutants. An endangerment determination would confirm the agency’s power, but also its obligation, to regulate greenhouse gases now.Indeed, the agency should begin by setting performance standards to reduce greenhouse gases from new major stationary sources, like coal-fired electric utilities and industrial facilities, and from new motor vehicles.
As a policy matter, there are excellent reasons to have the E.P.A. move ahead, rather than awaiting congressional action. While the regulatory process may not be nimble, agency experts have already done considerable preparation. And Congress may trail the agency. Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California who chairs the relevant Senate committee, has already announced that she does not expect a Senate vote on climate change legislation before 2010. Delay would be environmentally costly.
Read the full piece, here.
Showing 2,821 results
Matthew Freeman | February 19, 2009
CPR Member Scholar Nina Mendelson has a piece today in The New York Times’s “Room for Debate” feature on the news that EPA is working its way toward regulating carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act. As The Times quite directly and correctly puts it, “Under orders from the Supreme Court, which the Bush […]
Matthew Freeman | February 18, 2009
Over on Legal Planet, CPR Member Scholar Holly Doremus of UC-Davis and -Berkeley posted a blog Sunday on an upcoming decision on whether to introduce the Suminoe oyster, native to China and Japan, to the Chesapeake Bay. She writes: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a draft EIS last fall considering the impacts of […]
Shana Campbell Jones | February 17, 2009
You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again: climate change is different from traditional environmental problems. It’s global, for one thing. Carbon dioxide isn’t a traditional pollutant, for another. It doesn’t cause cancer. It doesn’t kill fish. Plants use it in photosynthesis; every human and animal emits it. The problem is that combustion creates […]
Matthew Freeman | February 16, 2009
Editor’s Note: Following is the last of four posts focused on federal preemption issues and featuring CPR Member Scholars Thomas McGarity and William Buzbee. In December, both published books on the issue. (The first blog post in the series includes some background on the issue. The second discussed the very real impact the outcome of […]
Matthew Freeman | February 13, 2009
Editor’s Note: Following is the third of four posts focused on federal preemption issues and featuring CPR Member Scholars Thomas McGarity and William Buzbee. In December, both published books on the issue. (The first blog post in the series includes some background on the issue. The second discussed the very real impact the outcome of […]
Yee Huang | February 12, 2009
From the airspace over the Indonesian gold mine Batu Hijau, it might seem as though the mythical King Midas has been resurrected in a modern, and twisted, form. Where King Midas of Greek lore was granted the touch of gold, the modern King Midas assumes the form of a global mining company that, in a […]
Margaret Clune Giblin | February 11, 2009
Both versions of the economic stimulus package – that passed by the House and by the Senate – include funding for the National Park Service. The bill the House passed last month would allocate $1.7 billion to the National Park Service for “projects to address critical deferred maintenance needs within the National Park System, including […]
Rena Steinzor | February 10, 2009
We’ve written a great deal about Cass Sunstein, the Harvard law professor who is expected to get the nod to be the “regulatory czar” for the Obama Administration. In a nutshell, our concern is that Sunstein will stifle the efforts of health, safety, and environmental protection agencies to struggle to their feet after eight long […]
Robert Verchick | February 9, 2009
About thirty miles from my front door, heavy barges are dumping rocks into Louisiana’s Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MRGO), hoping to permanently plug the de-commissioned shipping channel before the end of the next hurricane season. It’s a big plug. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that the structure will weigh 430,000 tons, “with a base 450 feet […]