OpenMarket: Air Quality

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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The Trump administration “might attack our authority” to establish greenhouse gas motor vehicle standards, California Air Resources Board (CARB) Chairman Mary Nichols told E&E news ($) last Thursday.

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

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After thirty years of mostly disappointments and defeats, 2017 has been a banner year for advancing free market policies across the board on energy, climate, and environmental issues. We at CEI are proud to have played an important role in promoting many of...

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In directing courts to set aside only agency actions that are “arbitrary, capricious…or otherwise not in accordance with law,” the Administrative Procedure Act’s section 706 sets forth a deferential default standard for judicial review of agency fact-finding and decision making. From a perspective of institutional power,...

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In a ruling published last October, U.S. District Court Judge John Bailey sided with Murray Energy against the Environmental Protection Agency in holding that the Clean Air Act requires the agency to perform continuing evaluations of job losses due to federal regulations.

On June 29th, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued a disappointing opinion...

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Readers of this blog are aware that CEI has long objected to a judicial settlement reached by the Environmental...

In a double dose of good news, the D.C. Circuit Court this week put on hold litigation surrounding two major Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency rules for existing power plants.

On Thursday, a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit granted the EPA’s request to pause litigation over the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, also known as the Utility MACT. As I’ve reported before, this rule would cost $10 billion annually, yet its bizarre purpose is to protect a supposed population of pregnant subsistence fisherwomen who eat hundreds of pounds of self-caught fish during their pregnancies, despite all the signs along rivers and lakes advising...