Senate Urged to Protect Clean Air Act from Climate Bill

Amid the trade-offs that went into the writing of the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) bill, someone took a hammer to a crown jewel of U.S. environmental law: the Clean Air Act.

The climate bill’s fate is in the Senate’s hands now, and the progressive grassroots movement MoveOn.org, other environmental groups and members of Congress are ramping up the pressure on senators to save the Clean Air Act from being shut down when it comes to CO2.

Buttressed by three rounds of amendments over the decades, the Clean Air Act has been effectively battling smog and other air pollution since 1970, providing the rulebook for the Environmental Protection Agency’s work.

Its New Source Performance Standards for Hazardous Pollutants have cut health-damaging emissions from power plants and industries, and its New Source Review has forced polluters to scrub acid-rain causing gases from smokestacks.

In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the venerable law's authority could extend to CO2. This year, with a new administration in power, the EPA determined that greenhouse gases pose a danger to human health and welfare and is considering how to develop rules to use the Clean Air Act to regulate them.

But the House version of ACES would prevent EPA action on CO2, and that's got at least one senator up in arms.

The oldest, dirtiest, least efficient plants—some 100 years old—would no longer have to clean up, and it’s highly unlikely that the price of carbon will be enough to force these dinosaurs to clean up at all, says Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who has vowed to fight to protect the Clean Air Act.

ACES would expressly prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants or ordering those plants to install the best available emissions control technology during upgrades.

EPA would not be allowed to write new performance standards for power plants based on climate change effects (section 811b); it would not be allowed to use climate change as a reason for adding greenhouse gases to the list of hazardous air pollutants in the Clean Air Act (section 833); and its New Source Review could not be applied to future power plants on the basis of its emissions of any greenhouse gas (section 834).

Some ACES supporters argue that, with a cap-and-trade program in place, those EPA roles wouldn’t be necessary.

Gillibrand, MoveOn.org, and other environmental groups and Congress members disagree.

Neutering the Clean Air Act’s influence over greenhouse gas emissions would remove an important check on the system, says NRDC Climate Center Director David Hawkins.

The Clean Air Act’s New Source Review requires power providers that want to modernize or expand their coal plants to also upgrade their old equipment with the best pollution control technology. The goal is to require upgrades rather than allowing aging coal plants, which are far less efficient than new ones, to continue polluting as they please.

California discovered in the 1990s what happens when a government loses the incremental pressure and relies solely on an emissions cap.

Its Regional Clean Air Incentives Market, or RECLAIM, counted on the market and emissions trading to lower pollution levels to a legally mandated cap. Instead, companies bought credits and delayed upgrading their equipment. The emissions reductions didn’t happen in time, and as the deadline approached, the South Coast Air Quality Management District had to step in and order pollution control technologies.

“With any particular sector, to do this right you want to have both declining carbon caps and increasing prices, but you also want to have these kinds of rules that push the industry in the right direction,” says Wes Boyd, founder of MoveOn.org.

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