Last Thursday (September 16, 2010), three groups, each led by the Coalition for Responsible Regulation (CRR), filed motions with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to “stay” (put a hold on) the Environmental Protection Agency’s recently finalized greenhouse gas regulations.
The EPA regulations at issue are:
- The Endangerment Rule, which finds that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions endanger public health and welfare, thereby obligating EPA to develop and adopt GHG emission standards for new motor vehicles.
- The Tailpipe Rule, which, per the Endangerment Rule, establishes first-ever GHG emission standards for new motor vehicles.
- The Triggering Rule, which holds that when the Tailpipe Rule takes effect (Jan. 2, 2011), “major” GHG emitting facilities will be “subject to regulation” under the Act’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program and Title V operating permits program.
- The Tailoring Rule, which amends the PSD and Title V definitions of “major emitting facility” to avoid the “absurd result” of EPA and State environmental agencies having to process an estimated 41,000 PSD permits and 6.1 million Title V permits every year.
The groups filing the motions are: (1) a coalition of business associations led by the National Association of Manufacturers; (2) the State of Texas; and (3) a coalition of public policy advocates. The industry group is asking the Court to stay the Endangerment Rule, the Triggering Rule, and the Tailoring Rule, although not the Tailpipe Rule. Texas and the advocacy groups ask for a stay on all four regulations pending the Court’s review and decision to uphold or vacate the rules.
One point the motion makes is unarguable. Granting a stay can cause no harm to public health, even if one assumes global warming is a big problem. After all, EPA itself estimates that the Tailpipe Rule — the only rule for which environmental effects are estimated — would avert less than 1/100th of a degree Fahrenheit of global warming by 2100. Thus, if the Tailpipe Rule survives judicial scrutiny, delaying its implementation by six months to a year would have no discernible environmental impact. Besides, the stay would not affect the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) recent revision of fuel economy (CAFE) standards, and the overwhelming lion’s share of emission reductions required by the Tailpipe Rule actually comes from the new fuel economy regulations.
In contrast, the motions argue, EPA’s rules are already harming the economy. The dubious legal basis of both the Tailoring Rule and EPA’s efforts to bully States into immediately amending their permit programs ”now impose a terrible uncertainty tax on our struggling economy, as no business is able to make plans or investments in reliance on a regulatory scheme so clearly at odds with the plain language of the Act.” Businesses and State permitting agencies will incur additional losses if they make investments based on EPA’s rules and the rules are subsequently overturned. Best to put the regs on hold until the Court rules on their legal bona fides.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is a party to the advocacy group motion, which makes a powerful case that the regulations should be stayed and, ultimately, overturned. Lest anyone suspect that I’m tooting my own horn, I had absolutely no role in either developing or drafting the motion.
Big Picture
As can be surmised from the description above, EPA’s four rules are interdependent. The Endangerment Rule authorizes and, indeed, compels EPA to establish GHG emission standards for new motor vehicles. The emission standards, promulgated via the Tailpipe Rule, make GHGs subject to regulation under PSD and Title V, according to the Triggering Rule. To avoid administrative paralysis, economic disruption, and political backlash, the Tailoring Rule exempts all but the largest GHG emitters from PSD and Title permitting requirements over the next six years, raising from 100/250 tons per year to 75,000/100,000 tons per year the cutoff for regulation as a “major” emitting facility.
This custer of regulations is a classic case of bureaucratic self-dealing. As discussed elsewhere, EPA has positioned itself to determine the stringency of fuel economy standards for the auto industry, set climate policy for the nation, and even amend provisions of the Clean Air act—powers Congress never delegated to the agency. The Endangerment Rule is both trigger and precedent for sweeping policy changes Congress never approved. America could end up with a pile of greenhouse gas regulations more costly than any climate bill or treaty the Senate has declined to pass or ratify, yet without the people’s representatives ever voting on it. Overturning EPA’s GHG rules is a constitutional imperative.
The Arguments
The motion to stay advances new arguments — or improved versions of familiar arguments — for overturning each of the four EPA rules. The following sections summarize and excerpt some of the motion’s key insights.
EPA Outsourced Its Endangerment Judgment
Section 202 of the Clean Air Act requires the Administrator to determine the dangerousness of air pollution from motor vehicles based on her “judgment.” Instead, the motion points out, quoting EPA’s Endangerment Rule:
“the Administrator … rel[ied] on the major assessments of USGCRP, IPCC and NRC as the primary scientific and technical basis of her endangerment decision.” 74 Fed. Reg. at 66,510.14
EPA specifically declined to undertake “a new and independent assessment,” id. at 66,511, preferring to “plac[e] primary and significant weight on these assessment reports in making her decision on endangerment.” Id.
Which means:
. . . the only “judgment” EPA really made is that IPCC can be trusted to have made the endangerment assessment required by the Act. But the Act does not authorize entities other than EPA to make that assessment. See, e.g., U.S. Telecom Ass’n v. FCC, 359 F.3d 554, 565 (D.C. Cir. 2004) (“[F]ederal agency officials … may not subdelegate to outside entities—private or sovereign—absent affirmative evidence of authority to do so.”).
In effect, EPA asks the Court and the American people to trust that the IPCC did its job objectively, adhering to U.S. Government standards of scientific integrity. “But neither this Court nor the interested public can determine whether IPCC in fact did so, because the innumerable choices made by its many authors are not in the record.” The Climategate emails reveal instances of behavior inconsistent with U.S. information quality standards, such as Climatic Research Unit Director Phil Jones vowing to keep peer-reviewed research contrary to his views out of the next IPCC report “even if we have to redefine what the peer reviewed literature is.”
Bottom line: The Endangerment Rule embodies “a scientific judgment made by IPCC, and then adopted by EPA, not supported by any record that this Court can review. This is error.”
EPA Fails to Make the Judgment Required by Sec. 202
“Endangerment,” the motion observes, “is not a scientific term with defined endpoints. It is not an objective measure, like the boiling point of water, but a value judgment, like ‘bad.’ And so before EPA finds ‘endangerment,’ it first must define it.” In other words, EPA must explain its judgment in terms of climate-related metrics like temperature, precipitation, or wind speed, such that the public can understand which changes in climatic variables constitute endangerment, and which do not. “EPA has failed to do so.”
To clarify this point, the motion compares EPA’s endangerment finding for motor vehicle GHG emissions with the agency’s 1973 endangerment finding for vehicular lead emissions. In the earlier rule, EPA provided quantitative information relating lead emissions to atmospheric concentrations, the latter to blood lead levels, and blood levels to brain function. In addition, EPA analyzed how regulation of lead in gasoline would reduce atmospheric concentrations, reduce lead levels in blood, and, thus, improve public health. Thus, “By the end of the rulemaking, EPA had fully explained all of the choices it made along the path of converting available scientific knowledge about lead toxicology and exposure into a policy-based finding of endangerment from automotive lead emissions sufficient to justify regulation, and allow—and survive—judicial review.”
In contrast, EPA “jumps from the tautology that ‘greenhouse gases cause a greenhouse effect’ to ‘greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare’ sufficient to warrant exactly the level of GHG reductions that happen to result from NHTSA’s imposition of the CAFE standards required by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act.” The motion continues:
It is as though EPA, in Ethyl [Corp. v. EPA, 541 F. 2d1, 1976], were defending a rule to ban leaded gasoline because lead is a poison at some unknown dose; cars burning leaded gasoline can emit lead, which has some unknown effect on atmospheric lead concentrations; and banning leaded gasoline would yield some unknown but trivial reduction in atmospheric lead levels, possibly mitigating by some unknown (but at best trivial) degree the unknown adverse effects that may result from atmospheric lead, although it is very, very possible that the ban would accomplish absolutely nothing at all.
“If anything,” the motion comments, “EPA should face a far greater burden to explain its policy choices here than it did in Ethyl. Lead is strictly a poison, whereas carbon dioxide is a natural component of clean air, ingested by all plants and exhaled by all animals. Life on Earth depends on the very ‘danger’ that EPA is trying to prevent.” Carbon dioxide is not only plant food, it also helps keep the Earth habitably warm.
In short, “An endangerment finding under Section 202(a) does not simply identify a health and welfare risk, as EPA contends; it also establishes the criteria that will inform whether the emission standards adopted to address that risk are rational. . . . EPA here failed to do so, first by rubber-stamping the IPCC’s findings instead of making its own assessment of the evidence, and then by disavowing any obligation to explain the various policy choices it made to reach its ultimate judgment and regulatory response.”
EPA’s Assessment of the Scientific Record Is Logically Flawed
Quoting (or parroting) the IPCC, EPA argues that it is “extremely unlikely” (less than a 5% probability) that the warmth of recent decades can be explained without “external forcing” by greenhouse gas emissions. But this conclusion is inconsistent with other IPCC statements. The IPCC acknowledges three potential drivers of climate change: (1) changes in incoming solar radiation (e.g. due to changes in the Earth’s orbit or the Sun); (2) changes in reflected solar radiation (e.g. due to changes in low-level cloud cover); and (3) changes in outgoing longwave radiation (e.g. due to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations). According to the IPCC, scientific understanding of the Sun’s role in climate change is “low” and there is “significant uncertainty” with regard to cloud behavior and reflectivity. If there is significant uncertainty about two of the three main drivers, it is impossible for EPA — or the IPCC — to be 95% certain which is in the driver’s seat. In the motion’s words:
EPA cannot, and does not, explain how its 95% certainty is justified on the record. There cannot simultaneously be both “significant uncertainty” about primary climate drivers and 95% certainty that anthropogenic GHGs are causing any observed warming, yet EPA concludes there is. This fails even minimal standards of rationality.
EPA’s Administrative Record Fails to Establish Any Non-Trivial Benefits from the Tailpipe Rule
Citing Ethyl Corp. (541 F.2d at 31 n. 62), the motion argues that an administrative agency’s regulatory actions should “fruitfully” attack the problem being addressed. Yet, by EPA’s own admission, the Tailpipe Rule would produce imperceptible benefits, reducing projected global warming by 0.006-0.015°C and projected sea-level rise by 0.06-0.14 cm in 2100.
EPA’s GHG Tailpipe Limits Accomplish No Public Benefit (If Any) that NHTSA’s CAFE Standards Do Not Already Accomplish
About 95% of all GHGs emitted by motor vehicles is carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuel combustion. As EPA’s Tailpipe Rule acknowledges (p. 25327), there is a “single pool of technologies . . . that reduce fuel consumption and thereby reduce CO2 emissions as well.” Unsurprisingly, the motion argues, “The [new] CAFE standards and EPA’s Tailpipe Rule are virtually identical, with irrelevant differences in how the two standards address air conditioning.”
The case law is not favorable to agencies duplicating the regulations of other agencies. Alas, the Tailpipe Rule is not merely redundant, it also has “profound and pernicious effects” on the economy, if, as EPA contends, it subjects millions of small stationary sources to Clean Air Act permitting requirements. In sum:
There is no rational basis for EPA to promulgate mobile source rules that do nothing more than reiterate other, independently effective legal requirements, and that offer no added environmental benefit but impose far-reaching and unintended costs on a source population (stationary sources) not even considered in the Endangerment Finding assessment.
The Tailoring Rule Is an Illegal Solution to a Legal Problem of EPA’s Own Creation
This is the most original part of the motion’s argument. To obtain a PSD permit to build or modify a “major” stationary source, the applicant must demonstrate the facility’s compliance with “best available control technology” (BACT) standards. EPA reads Section 165(a)(4) of the Clean Air Act as requiring BACT compliance and PSD permitting for major sources of almost any regulated air pollutant.** Since the Tailpipe Rule makes GHGs regulated air pollutants, major stationary sources of GHGs are subject to PSD and BACT, EPA reasons.
To reach this conclusion, however, EPA had to ignore statutory context. Sec. 165(a)(4) states:
No major emitting facility on which construction is commenced after August 7, 1977, may be constructed in any area to which this part applies unless . . . — the proposed facility is subject to the best available control technology for each pollutant subject to regulation under this chapter emitted from, or which results from, such facility [emphasis added].
In the foregoing, “this chapter” means the Clean Air Act. EPA reads the phrase “each pollutant subject to regulation under this chapter” apart from the qualifying and limiting phrase, ”in any area to which this part applies.” The “part” in question is Part C (Prevention of Significant Deterioration of Air Quality), and the “area” to which it applies is an attainment area. Part C is clearly distinguished from Part D, which addresses permitting requirements in non-attainment areas.
The distinction between attainment and non-attainment areas presupposes, and has no meaning apart from, the adoption of national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for the pollutant of concern. Properly construed, Sec. 165(a)(4) creates BACT and PSD obligations only in attainment areas based on a prior NAAQS rulemaking. Since there are no NAAQS for GHGs, there are no GHG attainment areas, hence no areas where Part C BACT and PSD requirements apply to GHG emitting facilities.
Since the Tailpipe Rule does not trigger BACT and PSD for stationary sources, there is also no need for EPA to play lawmaker and “tailor” — that is, amend– the PSD applicability thresholds. Similarly, because “Title V is intended solely to codify otherwise applicable requirements in permits issued to stationary sources,” and stationary sources have no new obligations as a consequence of EPA’s decision to regulate mobile source GHGs, there is no necessity to amend the Title V applicability threshold.
The motion sensibly concludes:
Having applied the Act to a “pollutant” under programs never intended for that “pollutant,” EPA is confronted with the need to undo the “absurd” results that follow by outright defiance of crystal-clear provisions of the statute, those setting forth the applicability thresholds. The far better—and only legal—choice instead is to avoid manufacturing overbreadth in the first place.
(If this argument is correct, then EPA bears a greater responsibility for Massachusetts v. EPA’s “legacy of absurd results” than I previously supposed.)
The Triggering and Tailoring Rules Treat the States as Vassals, Not As the Equal Sovereigns Contemplated by the Clean Air Act
EPA assumes it can simply command States to incorporate PSD permitting for GHGs in their State Implementation Plans (SIPs), or face imposition of an EPA-crafted Federal Implementation Plan (FIP). Not so, the motion argues:
Section 110(a)(2)(C) requires each State’s permit program to mandate permits only for “modification and construction of any stationary source within the areas covered by the plan as necessary to assure that national ambient air quality standards are achieved, including a permit program as required in parts C and D….” 42 U.S.C. § 7410(a)(2)(C). EPA has no basis, then, to disapprove a State’s permit program for failing to govern emissions of a pollutant for which there is no NAAQS.
EPA assumes that the Tailpipe Rule and Tailoring Rules will or at least should automatically revise State permitting programs and the SIPs governing them. In so doing, EPA erroneously views the States as vassals, because “no sovereign can delegate to another the ability to make its laws. The State must by some affirmative act ratify any changes in pollutants and applicability thresholds incorporated from federal laws before they become effective.”
EPA’s rush to incorporate GHGs into State permitting programs also runs afoul of procedural requirements. Section110 of the Clean Air Act “allows at least 18 months after proper adoption of new SIP expectations before requiring their implementation by the States.” In addition, Section 166 allows States 21 months to submit a plan revision following an EPA rulemaking calling for the addition of new pollutants in the PSD program. “EPA, of course, has undertaken no such rulemaking, nor allowed any time for each State to respond.” Indeed, one of the rules EPA recently proposed to bypass the normal SIP revision process would “give States perhaps three weeks in December to respond to a call for revisions to their SIPs, or face a construction ban on January 2, 2011.”
A Stay Would Allow for Rational Policy Development
The House passed a cap-and-trade bill in June 2009, but in 2010 cap-and-trade died in the Senate. Senators mounted an unsuccessful effort to overturn EPA’s Endangerment Rule, but all 41 Republicans and six Democrats voted for the resolution of disapproval. “The 111th Congress evidently will adjourn unable to either ratify the current state of affairs or change it, but the 112th may be rather more willing to announce an opinion on behalf of the electorate. A stay would allow for the possibility that Congress finally will state its intentions to regulate GHGs under the Clean Air Act, or not, so that this Court will not have to speak for it.” ‘Nuff said.
** The Clean Air Act prescribes separate and tougher permitting requirements for major sources of toxic air pollutants and criteria air pollutants in areas failing to meet national ambient air quality standards.
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