What the EPA wants

Our story about the EPA was spot-on and accurate. It’s true that the agency’s court filing outlined a “tailoring rule” as a more gradual approach to hiring 230,000 people at a cost of $21 billion. But the EPA was clear that “the Tailoring Rule is calculated to move toward eventual full compliance with the statutory threshold” — meaning it’s not a question of if the EPA wants to triple its budget, but when.

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.