OpenMarket: Air Quality

Several of the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency’s most expensive and far-reaching Clean Air Act regulations are back in the news now that the Trump administration is trying to scale them back. While there is little doubt that potential changes to the Clean Power Plan, Utility Maximum Achievable Control Technology, and Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules could save billions of dollars and countless jobs, they are far from the only Obama EPA rules in need of review.

Maryland, New York, and Connecticut are following California’s lead in proposing restrictions on hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), the class of refrigerants widely used in home and car air conditioners as well as the refrigeration equipment in millions of small businesses like restaurants and convenience stores. State legislators and governors are doing so on the grounds that HFCs contribute to global warming. 

The Environmental Protection Agency on August 21st released its proposed rule to replace the “Clean Power” Plan (CPP). The rule, which is called the Affordable Clean Energy Rule (ACE), would get rid of the CPP’s takeover of the grid and concentrate on “inside the fence” regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from individual coal and natural gas power plants. 

The Trump administration is expected tomorrow to release its proposed revisions of the Obama administration’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) and motor vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards for model years 2021 and later. On Saturday, July 28, The New York Times posted a leaked draft that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) sent in May to the White House for review. The question of the hour is whether the final draft released tomorrow will retain or retreat from the May draft’s bold initiatives.

Greenhouse gas/fuel economy standards encourage automakers to reduce average vehicle size and weight. That is hardly surprising. It takes less fuel to move smaller, lighter vehicles than it does to move bigger, heavier ones. However, size and weight reduction as a downside. As my colleague Sam Kazman pungently puts it in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, fuel economy mandates kill people. It’s a matter of basic physics. Lighter vehicles have less mass to absorb collision forces, while smaller cars provide less space between the occupant and the point of impact.

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, nineteen other state attorneys general, and the head of the Mississippi department of environmental quality recently filed a superb comment letter on the Environmental Protection Agency’s advance notice of proposed rulemaking entitled “State Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Existing Electric Utility Generating Units.” The notice requests information on a potential replacement rule for the so-called Clean Power Plan, which the Environmental Protection Agency plans to repeal...

The Environmental Protection Agency is in the process of repealing President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the principal regulatory component of his Paris Climate Treaty emission-reduction pledge. CEI Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis makes the case that the EPA should simply repeal the Clean Power Plan without replacing it.

Its success in policymaking notwithstanding, the "race to the bottom" theory has fared poorly with the passage of time.

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If that’s true, it’s a very big deal....