August 4, 2015
By Kate Sheppard
WASHINGTON -- Critics of the Obama administration's (click here) new rules for power plant emissions have been quick to describe them as "government overreach" and "flagrantly unlawful." What they don't say is that congressional inaction and a mandate from the Supreme Court drove the regulatory process to this point.
The new rules limiting the emission of planet-warming greenhouse gases from power plants, which the Environmental Protection Agency finalized on Monday, were written under the Clean Air Act, a law originally adopted in 1970 to regulate sources of air pollution.
From Obama's first days in office, his administration stressed that it did not want to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, describing it as a non-ideal way to address this type of pollution. But legal mechanisms were already in the works to force the Obama administration to do exactly that if Congress declined to issue new, greenhouse-gas-specific rules.
Some historical context is helpful for understanding why and exactly how the new rules came to be....
By Kate Sheppard
WASHINGTON -- Critics of the Obama administration's (click here) new rules for power plant emissions have been quick to describe them as "government overreach" and "flagrantly unlawful." What they don't say is that congressional inaction and a mandate from the Supreme Court drove the regulatory process to this point.
The new rules limiting the emission of planet-warming greenhouse gases from power plants, which the Environmental Protection Agency finalized on Monday, were written under the Clean Air Act, a law originally adopted in 1970 to regulate sources of air pollution.
From Obama's first days in office, his administration stressed that it did not want to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, describing it as a non-ideal way to address this type of pollution. But legal mechanisms were already in the works to force the Obama administration to do exactly that if Congress declined to issue new, greenhouse-gas-specific rules.
Some historical context is helpful for understanding why and exactly how the new rules came to be....
