Leaving the federal government with considerable power to impose controls on greenhouse gases that contribute to heating up the planet and causing climate change, on Monday the Supreme Court also delivered a stern lecture to the Environmental Protection Agency for claiming regulatory power that Congress did not give it.
June 23, 2014
Today, in the Supreme Court, "EPA mostly wins, but with criticism."
Lyle Denniston explains Utility Air Regulatory Group v. Environmental Protection Agency.
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10 comments:
Oh, a stern lecture. That will teach the Obama Administration a real lesson.
Haha. Like the career government lawyers in the EPA care what SCOTUS says. I know I wouldn't.
This gives a different take on the decision. The court could not reverse the parts of the regulations it did not like. That is the legislators' job. It did limit the EPA's ability to write its own rules.
I believe that Turley's observations of June 22 are accurate and that the House and Senate are going to have to stop delegating unfettered powers to administrative agencies. They are going to have to take responsibility for their votes. There's a concept!
Kagan, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Bader-Ginsburg believe that the EPA has the authority to regulate cow farts. The other justices disagreed. Environmental Studies majors hardest hit.
One take is that the majority seems willing to allow the agency to do its CO2 thing with plants that are already under its purview, but not expand to others, until now, unmonitored sites. And, that was really what the EPA was trying to do. Or, wasn't, because it couldn't afford to, so was reinterpreting the law to allow it more discretion than the law gave it. So, currently monitored sites can now be monitored for CO2, but no one else can be.
Something like that.
...strong letter to follow.
I think we NEED greenhouse gases that warm up the atmosphere ... since North America has been cooling since the 1930s.
It's a start.
But maybe the SCOTUS would've done better to tweet sternly at them.
since North America has been cooling since the 1930s.
Hardly.
This will be the hottest year on record.
I work in the environmental field, and the EPA completely rewrote some of the trigger levels that are provide for in the Clean Air Act statutes. The threshold trigger levels for requiring a more restrictive air permit were written for "traditional" pollutants and are 100 and 250 tons. Since CO2 emissions are in the 100x that (or more), the EPA wrote the rule to have trigger levels of 50,000 to 100,000 tons.
One of the main arguments industry had against these rules is that the EPA had to follow the Clean Air Act statue itself, which would mean that the average mom and pop dry cleaner and thousands of other small business will now have to get federal Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) and Title V air permits. These types of air permits require public notice, air dispersion modeling, control technology evaluation and so on.
So, welcome to my world you several tens of thousands of small business. Remember, before you add another dry cleaner or increase your current capacity, don't forget to get/revise your PSD and Title V permits. The whole process only takes 18 or more months, and several tens of thousands of dollars.
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