New Blog Post: A Bumpy Road for the Clean Power Plan
On August 3, 2015, the US Environmental Protection Agency issued its final Clean Power Plan regulations. The new rule, of course, is aimed at reducing carbon pollution from major sources, such as coal-burning power plants, that contribute to climate change. The issuing of those regulations, however, should not be mistaken as the end of a bumpy road. As Resources for the Future (RFF) Senior Fellow Joel Darmstadter points out in a new blog post, in many ways, the rulemaking remains an ongoing process.
In the post, Faulting EPA's Perspective on the Climate Threat: Fair Game?, Darmstadter points out that six months later, “legal challenges and hostile legislators could impede an early and successful end game” for the Clean Power Plan.
He specifically looks at a recent example in the form of a petition to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that calls for a “Stay of EPA’s Final Rule.” It was filed on behalf of a number of litigants, among them the State of West Virginia, Peabody Energy Corporation, and Professor Lawrence H. Tribe of the Harvard Law School.
One of the assertions from the petitioners is that “EPA’s projections of potential harm . . . go well beyond the latest report of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (IPCC). Darmstadter points out that since the petition elected to bypass IPCC findings needed to confront EPA’s multi-stage analysis, it leaves its assault on EPA, at the very least, tenuous.
Read Joel Darmstadter’s full post: Faulting EPA's Perspective on the Climate Threat: Fair Game?
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