The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) endangerment finding gives the agency justification to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, most notably carbon dioxide (CO2), under the Clean Air Act (CAA). The EPA already began targeting motor vehicles last year and will start regulating emissions from new power plants and major expansions of large greenhouse-gas-emitting plants (more than 25,000 tons of CO2 per year) this year. Several Members of Congress released or plan to release bills to either delay or prohibit the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. Some ideas are better than others; …
Yesterday marked the 40th birthday of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Air Act (CAA), and environmentalists celebrated by reminding us how beneficial the regulation has been at improving air quality in the U.S. Now the EPA wants to turn the Clean Air Act’s birthday party into an all-out rager by allowing them to do what elected officials could not: regulate carbon dioxide (CO2). First things first. Air quality was improving before the passage of the 1970 CAA. Environmentalists should give more credit to innovation and less to top-down regulation. …
When the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill passed in the House before last year’s summer recess, Members voting for its passage heard loudly from constituents. Since then the Senate has been reluctant to move forward with a counterpart. It took Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Kerry (D-MA) nearly a year to release their cap and trade bill. But what Congress has failed to do, the Environmental Protection Agency is willing and able. The agency has already begun the process of imposing costly and environmentally questionable CO2 cuts by using …
Whatever prospects lie ahead for cap and trade legislation moving through the Senate might not matter if the Environmental Protection Agency continues forward on its path to regulate carbon dioxide. The EPA’s endangerment finding, which took place earlier this year, gives the agency the authority to use Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases (GHGs). New restrictions on automobiles were the first step in what could eventually be a long, economically painful set of regulations imposed by unelected government bureaucrats – unless Congress steps up to the plate and stops …
The Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding states that greenhouse gases, most significantly carbon dioxide, are a dangerous pollutant and need to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. While the finding itself does not regulate carbon dioxide, it commences a long process to curb greenhouse gas emissions, beginning with tailpipe emissions this March and later expanding to all types of business. Those who want to challenge the EPA’s endangerment finding have until February 16th to file a petition in the in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. On December 23rd, …
John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, really made a name for himself when his op-ed, “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare“, ran in the Wall Street Journal last summer. In the latest issue of the New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten profiles Mackey and his ideas of “conscious capitalism.” When asked what Mackey was reading, One of the books on the list was “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming—the Missing Science,” a skeptical take on climate change. Mackey told me that he agrees with the book’s assertion that, as he …
Carbon dioxide is dangerous and a threat not only to human health but our entire planet. How do we know? The Environmental Protection Agency told us so, officially announcing that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases are “the primary driver of climate change, which can lead to hotter, longer heat waves that threaten the health of the sick, poor or elderly; increases in ground-level ozone pollution linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses; as well as other threats to the health and welfare of Americans.” But there’s two important …
