USEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson addresses the media (artist’s conception)
When EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson signed the Agency’s official endangerment finding yesterday, it got a lot of press. Let’s talk a bit about what that means.
First of all, note the verb: “signed”. Many in the MSM use the verb “issued”. Not to quibble, but allow me to quibble. The endangerment finding was “issued” in April. Everyone in the enviro community has known about it for a long time. This was not, in the real sense of the word, news. After the finding was issued, there was a 60 day public comment period, which closed in June. At that point, EPA had an obligation to read the public comments and, if they found any of them especially worthy, to modify the finding accordingly.
Granted, there were 350,000 comments, but this was a finding, not a rule-making. Are we to believe that Jackson might read all of the comments and decide “you know, maybe greenhouse gases aren’t a problem after all”? Either greenhouse gases endanger our health and the environment or they do not. Everybody knew that Jackson was going to sign off on the finding, the only question was: when? By some happy coincidence, the day that Jackson’s crew was done reviewing the comments – and decided not to alter the finding in any significant way – and thus put Jackson in a position to sign the thing, coincided with day one of the Climate Commisariat in Copenhagen. A less cynical soul might suspect a political, rather than scientific, motivation is at work here, but we will move on.
As the Wall Street Journal correctly reports, once a pollutant has been identified, it must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Under the Clean Air Act, EPA has to regulate “major sources” of pollutants. What’s a “major source”? That would be any facility with the potential to emit 100 tons per year of a regulated air pollutant. You have the ability to emit 100 tons per year of greenhouse gases if the combined rating of all of the natural gas burning equipment in your home or place of business is about 150,000 Btu/hr. Doesn’t mean that you do emit this much, it just means that you can. The Clean Air Act is quite clear: one is regulated according to potential not actual emissions.
So, could you, dear reader emit 100 tons per year of greenhouse gases?
(I will pause while you run to check the rating on your furnace and hot water heater).
For many of you – particularly those with older furnaces – the answer is “yes”. If you own a business of any size at all, the answer is “yes”. If you run an elementary school, or are the pastor of a church, or are responsible for your local village hall, the answer is “yes”.
Now I’m not suggesting that even EPA would be arrogant enough to try to make homeowners enter its permit program (although I’m not dismissing the idea either), I’m rather making a point. This is an extremely tiny threshold. If we were to apply the 100 tons/year threshold to greenhouse gases – the threshold that is specifically listed in an Act of Congress – the number of new major sources subject to regulation would be staggering. WSJ says hundreds of thousands of new sources. Close but not quite a cigar. The actual numbers would be in the millions – with most estimates around six million or so.
This is why EPA promulgated the “tailoring rule”, which raises the major source threshold to 25,000 tons per year for greenhouse gases. It’s the Agency’s way of admitting that, much as they would LOVE to regulate six million new sources, that may be a somewhat unrealistic goal – AT THIS TIME!
Many of us, on the industry side, hope that the tailoring rule gets shot down in court. I’m no Floyd, but it seems to me that when a regulation is in conflict with an actual Act of Congress the regulation should lose. That’s not the Loki in me speaking there (though I would enjoy the chaos immensely). Dumping six million new sources on the Agency may be the best way to cut this back door effort to force enviro-communism upon us off at the knees. It would paralyze the EPA, at all levels, through system overload.
Thus, in the coming months, we will be treated to an amusing display in role reversal. The enviros will argue against strict adherence to the Clean Air Act – effectively advocating lenience in regulation – because it gives them a route to focus on destroying the evil coal, oil and natural gas fired power generators that are KILLING THE PLANET. Industry, on the other hand, will argue for strict regulation and adherence to the law.
Funny world isn’t it? One day they’re hiding the decline. The next day, they’re trying to circumvent the Clean Air Act.
It ain’t easy being green.
Print
Digg
StumbleUpon
del.icio.us
Facebook
Yahoo! Buzz
Twitter
Google Bookmarks
Google Buzz
LinkedIn
MSN Reporter
MySpace
Orkut
Ping.fm
Reddit
RSS
Slashdot
Technorati
Tumblr
Webnews.de
“We’re from the government, and we’re here to help you”
collapse the system.
How can the EPA modify the Clean Air Act? Is the doctrine of separation of powers only relevant when preventing the White House social secretary from testifying to Congress?
Rich, what do you know about H.R. 391?
It’s “in committee” right now, but I’ll let Stephanie explain what that means ’cause I’ll screw it up again.
And if you can explain what nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride are, that’d be good. (Or not is good too, if it’s too technical.)
Mike,
Hydrofluorocarbons and perfluorocarbons are types of refrigerants. Remember when the hole in the ozone layer was going to kills us? Everybody had to get rid of their ozone-eating chlorinated refrigerants. They replaced them with these guys, which are fluorinated. Ooops! Turns out every pound of the flouroinated refrigerants is hundreds to thousands of times more potent a global warming gas than one pound of carbon dioxide.
Sulfur hexaflouride (SF6) is another gas. It’s got a few specialty uses, but not much. It’s also emitted when making aluminum. It’s global warming potential is like 11,000 times that of carbon dioxide.
Nike, by the by, used to use SF6 in the heels of some its gym shoes. It made for a cushioney walk, apparently. They discontinued that practice (substituting nitrogen instead, if memory serves) when they learned that SF6 is KILLING THE PLANET.
Now they take credit for “cutting” their greenhouse gas emissions by so many bagillion tons. They don’t tell you how this miraculous “cut” was achieved. No doubt that, if they greased the right pockets, they’ll get extra allowances to sell under cap and trade, in recognition of their environmental stewardship.
How’s that hole in the ozone doing, by the way?
If I recall correctly, for some reason it appeared over the South Pole every winter. I thought, as a layman, that this could be because sunlight creates ozone. Get rid of the sun for a few months and the ozone levels drop.
Why not at the North Pole, then?
I have no idea. I’m not an expert. The question is, did banning CFCs end the hole in the ozone? I’ve yet to hear.
Don’t know about HR 391 – going to do some checking though.
I was able to find out that HR 391 was assigned to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
My representative isn’t on it so I guess I don’t get a say on the proposed bill. If anybody wants to see if his rep is there, click the link and use the arrow buttons to scroll. (59 members!)
Anyone interested in a documented case, where the temperature record was “adjusted” UP – feel free to have a look-see:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/
Ozone hole – all gone! No problem. Move along.
It was never a hole, actually. It was seasonal thinning of the ozone layer over the Antarctic. But that sounds much less ominous, so everyone went with “hole”.
I actually think the CFC ban was a good thing. There was evidence that the thinning (a natural occurrence with or without CFCs) was increasing, the chemistry made sense and the cost of dealing with the problem was relatively low.
Why not the North Pole too? Because the ozone layer knows not to f**k with North American man! Seriously, I have long-ago forgotten. It has to do with meteorological crap, which always bores me to tears.
Probably less “mixing” in the upper atmosphere over the North Pole, because there’s no land there to create a temperature difference to cause a lot of wind.
Either way, it’s odd it’s never mentioned as a success story. Unless success is not what environmentalists are after.
I read that the cost for an EPA certification of compliance will be around $125,000 — I don’t recall whether that was per facility or per building. Our county public school system has around 90 sites, averaging probably 3.5 buildings per site (it probably depends upon how you count trailers [ahem] modular adjunct facilities.) Even if you only require 1 permit per school site, last I heard they didn’t have $11.25 Million to spare, God forbid they have to perform any repairs to reach compliant.
Any idea whether these certifications require annual renewal?
RES,
A strict reading of the Clean Air Act would require all “major sources” to enter the Title V permit program. Under Title V, major sources have to renew their permits every five years. If we just deal with the permit program (certifications are a different beast – one that is not necessarily activated by the mechanism I described above) the cost to file a permit application would probably be around $5 to $10 K per facility + EPA fees. Call it $10 to $15K per source – for most small (yet still “major”) sources – all day.
The big money transfer would occur more subtly. Once EPA established permit authority over a new universe of sources, they would have virtually free reign to impose new control requirements on those sources. In the case of greenhouse gases, they could – for example – require permitees to only operate heating furnaces with certain minimum energy efficiency. Thus, in your example, the public school system would be faced with the choice of a) purchasing new furnaces that meet the EPA’s requirement, or b) paying a fine to EPA that will – by EPA policy – be more than the cost of the furnaces and then purchasing them anyway.
Industry is quite used to this kind of racketeering by the EPA. It might actually be useful for the rest of the nation to get a taste of it too!
I’m no Algore but I thought the hole was caused the electromagnetic field being weaker there. The O3 was being stripped of an O by solar radiation.
ryukyu… if you are a non-scientist pontificating on a scientific issue then you are similar to algore….
Ryukyu, I thought that ozone was created by solar radiation. (It could be both, in some sort of complex feedback loop.) But I don’t know that the magnetic field is stronger at the South Pole than at the North.
caused by the electromagnetic field…that is
Here’s a question:
If water vapor is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, (I wouldn’t be asking this question if it wasn’t, by the way) then why isn’t the EPA getting into the business of regulating the emissions of water vapor?