Greens: No escape from Clean Air Act on CO2

By Steve Milloy —— Bio and Archives July 28, 2009

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Carbon Control News reports:

A key Sierra Club attorney says the group’s support for final passage of a climate bill is conditioned on the preservation of EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act [CAA] to require reductions in greenhouse gases (GHGs) from existing facilities, an assertion that appears to be a reversal from the group’s prior support for a House-passed cap-and-trade bill that would strip the agency of most of its air act authorities in dealing with GHG emissions.

One reason many industries have been willing to go along with cap-and-trade is to escape tortuous and unpredictable EPA regulation of CO2 under the CAA. In addition to the many onerous provisions of the CAA, the law has aggressive “citizen suit” provisions that enable the greens to enforce the law by legal action. So the greens are either:

• Using the threat of EPA regulation as a way to coerce any industry hold-outs into signing a climate deal now; or they are
• Maneuvering to pull the rug out from industry at the last moment and have EPA regulation somehow inserted into any final bill.

Any CEO who signs on to a climate bill in order to create so-called “regulatory certainty” is too stupid to live has reached his level of incompetence. 😊