House Committee Acts To Stop President’s de facto Drilling Moratorium
The House Natural Resources Committee marked up three bills on Wednesday that would require the Obama Administration to stop its obstructive tactics and start producing more oil and natural gas from federal Outer Continental Shelf areas. Committee Democrats dragged out the mark-up for nine hours by offering and insisting on recorded votes on a series of amendments to weaken or gut the three bills—H. R. 1229, 1230, and 1231. None of their amendments was adopted.
It is expected that the House will pass all three bills in May. Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) plans to introduce additional bills in the next few months to increase domestic oil and gas production on federal lands in Alaska and the Rocky Mountains as part of House Republicans’ American Energy Initiative.
House Leadership Tacitly Endorses Excellent EPA Strategy
Environment and Energy News reported this week that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) did not rule out attaching something like the Energy Tax Prevention Act (H. R. 910) to the bill to raise the federal debt ceiling. H. R. 910 would block the Environmental Protection Agency from using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. It passed the House last week on a 255 to 172 vote, but failed as an amendment in the Senate on a 50 to 50 vote.
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Today, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a major rule to regulate power plants under the Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAP) Section 112 of the Clean Air Act.
This post is a primer on this consequential and controversial decision.
Section 112 of the Clean Air Act
- In 1970, the Congress added Section 112 to the Clean Air Act, requiring that the EPA list and regulate Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) that could “cause, or contribute to, an increase in mortality or an increase in serious irreversible or incapacitating reversible illness.” The Congress ordered the EPA to establish standards for HAPs that provided “an ample margin of safety to protect public health.”
- Due to difficulties interpreting what should constitute “an ample margin of safety,” the EPA largely ignored Section 112 for two decades.
- In 1990, the Congress, frustrated with the slow pace of HAP regulation, amended the Clean Air Act to remove much of EPA’s discretion over the implementation of Section 112. Lawmakers listed 189 pollutants for regulation. They also legislated HAP pollution controls, known as Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) standards. The Clean Air Act amendments set a “MACT floor” (i.e., a minimum HAP pollution control) at “the average emission limitation achieved by the best performing 12 percent of the existing sources.”
- Section 112 MACT standards apply to both new and existing stationary sources.
- Notably, the Congress required the EPA to proceed with caution before it regulated Electricity Generating Units (“EGUs,” or power plants). The 1990 Clean Air Amendments mandated a study on the public health threats posed by EGU HAP emissions, and the EPA Administrator was authorized to proceed with the regulation of HAPs from EGUs only after evaluating the results of this study, and concluding that “such regulation is appropriate and necessary.”
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The Environmental Protection Agency sprang two surprises last week. First, EPA asked a federal judge to allow them to delay issuing the boiler MACT (Maximum Available Control Technology) rule until April 2012, which would give EPA time to reconsider and rewrite the proposed regulation. The rule is designed to cut air pollution from approximately 200,000 industrial boilers, process heaters, solid waste incinerators, etc. Industrial users of boilers have made a good case that the proposed standards were going to be impossible to meet in many cases.
Next, EPA announced that the ozone or smog rule would be delayed until July 2011, while it reconsidered the scientific and health studies on smog’s effects. The announcement suggests that EPA has bowed to intense opposition from Congress, state and local governments, and industry and is now going to re-write the smog rule so that it is less economically catastrophic. EPA nonetheless is going ahead with regulating greenhouse gas emissions from major stationary sources on January 1, 2011. There is little reason to think that those regulations are any less damaging than the smog rule.
The EPA also announced last week that it was holding its second National Bed Bug Summit meeting in early February. You may laugh, but at least with bed bugs EPA is addressing a real environmental health problem.
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