Energy group praises bill curbing EPA regulatory abuses

Center for Energy and Environment Director Daren Bakst was cited by The Center Square regarding new EPA bill.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank which had previously criticized the EPA for policies like tightening carbon emissions standards for power plants, hailed the bill’s sponsors for taking action.

“Instead of reacting to agency overreach after-the-fact, this bill makes it clear up front that the EPA is prohibited from using the Clean Air Act to take actions that common sense tells us Congress never would have authorized,” Daren Bakst, director of CEI’s Center for Energy and Environment, told The Center Square. “The legislation lists specific prohibitions addressing abuses we know the EPA has already engaged in and will likely try again. It also has an important catch-all provision to prohibit other future abuses.”

The Clean Air Act, enacted in 1970, allowed the federal government and states to develop regulations to limit the emission of toxic air pollutants from industrial and mobile sources.

Amendments to the act beginning in the 1990s expanded the EPA’s authority, allowing the agency to take actions like limiting the sulfur content in diesel fuel and enforcing the phasing out of ozone-depleting chemicals.

Bakst believes as soon as the EPA approves or tries to implement regulations so strict that they effectively force transition to electric vehicles or renewable energy generation, for example, the agency is clearly overstepping its authority. 

Read the full article at The Center Square.