Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson yesterday an nounced that the EPA has determined that global warming, allegedly caused by mankind’s burning of fossil fuels, endangers public health.
The finding paves the way for a huge power grab by EPA bureaucrats — indeed, more power than even they think they can handle: The likely regulatory cascade will end up with the EPA having complete control over the nation’s energy supply and its use.
Large apartment buildings and hospitals would need EPA operating permits to continue running their furnaces. Lawnmowers and aircraft alike would be regulated for fuel economy like automobiles. And as the EPA orders a retooling or even closure of the nation’s power plants, electricity prices would skyrocket, and blackouts would become common.
If you wanted to design an anti-stimulus package, you’d be hard-pressed to top this.
The EPA already holds massive power to stop energy projects. It has used its regulatory powers to hold up the construction of new coal, gas, nuclear and even renewable-power plants and electricity-transmission lines around the country. The US Chamber of Commerce’s Project No Project Web site details hundreds of energy projects that could be providing many thousands of good jobs, but are now held up by regulatory delay (typically initiated by environmental groups).
Yesterday’s finding will much expand those powers. It will trigger a regulatory avalanche that vastly expand the number of activities that require EPA permitting — fast-food franchises, apartment buildings and hospitals will soon all have to face the same crushing federal bureaucracy that has bedeviled energy firms for years.
Essentially, the EPA’s claim that it is obliged to regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) as a pollutant will oblige it to impose costly, time-consuming permitting requirements on 1) tens of thousands of previously unregulated small businesses, under the Clean Air Act’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) pre-construction permitting program, and 2) millions of previously unregulated entities, under the Title V operating-permits program.
The EPA recognizes the danger. It has issued a “tailoring rule” that warns that if PSD and Title V are applied “literally” to CO2 emissions, the permitting programs will crash under their own weight, construction activity will grind to a screeching halt — and millions of firms will find themselves operating in legal limbo.
Realizing that this would still produce a thunderous political backlash, the EPA wrote the “tailoring rule” to limit its regulation of CO2 to facilities emitting 25,000 tons of gases a year — even though the Clean Air Act requires it to cover facilities emitting just 250 tons.
That is, the EPA is trying to acquire the extra powers from the endangerment finding, while avoiding the accompanying duty of regulating small businesses.
But this blatant maneuver is unlikely to withstand legal challenge. The EPA will soon be blocking every new construction project you can think of.
The endangerment finding comes at a time when a batch of e-mails leaked from one of the most important climate-science research units in Britain has put the underlying science on which the finding is based under increased scrutiny.
The “Climategate” e-mails indicate likely manipulation of data, a concerted effort to prevent publication of skeptical views in the academic literature and an effort to hide data and methods in order to prevent outside researchers from checking the British scientists’ results — when such checking is the real test of knowledge in science.
The e-mails do not disprove that the world has been warming, or that fossil fuels have something to do with it — but they do cast doubt on whether the current warming is in any way unusual.
That is an important consideration in deciding whether the current warming endangers human health and welfare. EPA’s decision to simply ignore it and press forward with its endangerment finding represents a premature rush to judgment. Thus, the finding is a purely political move.
That is why we at the Competitive Enterprise Institute announced yesterday that we will file suit in federal court to overturn the endangerment finding on the grounds that the EPA has ignored major scientific issues, including but not limited to those raised recently in the Climategate scandal.
But lawmakers shouldn’t rely on CEI to save America from the EPA’s power grab. Congress should enact legislation, such as that offered by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), to make it plain that the Clean Air Act applies to emissions that directly threaten human health — not ones that might be tied to climate change.
If Congress doesn’t act, today’s finding will destroy any hope of economic recovery. Millions of jobless Americans will have the EPA to thank for their misery.
Iain Murray is vice president for strategy and Marlo Lewis is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.