Politico published a piece today with a headline calling a Daily Caller report “comically wrong” and “not based in fact.” A quick review of Politico’s actual story, however, shows DC item is mostly true. The DC story opens:
This is almost all true. The EPA did file a document in federal court that calls regulating greenhouse gas under the Clean Air Act “absurd” and “impossible to administer.” You can read the document here. In that same document, the EPA claims that using the Clean Air Act to stop global warming would require “hiring 230,000 full-time employees” in order “to produce the 1.4 billion work hours required to address the actual increase in permitting functions would result in an increase in Title V administration costs of $21 billion per year.”
The only shaky part of the DC story was the claim that “the agency is still asking for taxpayers to shoulder the burden” of these regulations. In fact, the EPA filed the court document in question in an effort to avoid these costs.
The problem is that the Clean Air Act was never designed to regulate carbon. The CAA requires the EPA to issue permits for all “sources” that emit more than 100 tons of a “pollutant” a year. This standard, which is in the statute, works great for real pollutants like mercury and sulfur dioxide. But carbon is not a real pollutant and was never intended to be classified as a pollutant under the CAA. It is ubiquitous in our environment, is non-toxic to humans, and many entities, like churches, schools, and hospitals, emit far mare than 100 tons of carbon every year. If the EPA were to treat carbon as a pollutant under the CAA, the Institute for Energy Research (IER) estimates the EPA would have to issue permits for “260,000 office buildings, 150,000 warehouses, 100,000 schools, 92,000 health care facilities, 58,000 food service buildings, 37,000 churches, 26,000 places of public assembly, and 17,000 farms.”
The EPA court filing essentially confirms IER’s predictions of economic Armageddon should EPA regulate greenhouse gasses. EPA wants to get around this problem by rewriting the statutory 100 ton pollutant limit. But the EPA has no legal authority to rewrite the law in this manner. Hence the lawsuit.
Bottom line, even the Obama administration admits it would cost $21 billion to regulate carbon using the Clean Air Act.
