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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 2 years

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Greenhouse gas emissions should be subject to legal controls in the US and phased out under the Toxic Substances Control Act, according to a group of scientists and former public officials, in a novel approach to the climate crisis.

“Using the TSCA would be one small step for [the Us President] Joe Biden, but potentially a giant leap for humankind – as a first step towards making the polluters pay,” said James Hansen, a former NASA scientist, who is a member of the group alongside Donn Viviani, a retired 35-year veteran of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Their legal submission, filed to the EPA on Thursday, states that greenhouse gas emissions present a danger to the climate and should be regulated as such under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), a law passed in 1976 as part of a suite of environmental regulations in the US.

The TSCA, which was amended in 2016, allows the EPA to place monitoring requirements on companies and enforce strict controls on certain substances. It has been used to restrict chemicals including asbestos, lead in paint, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

The law covers substances that pose “an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment”. The petitioners believe it can be interpreted to allow for a phase-out of greenhouse gas emissions.

Viviani said: “TSCA is like the ruby slippers [in The Wizard of Oz] – it can do just about anything. It can allow you to put a levy on carbon, and can deal with the legacy of carbon emissions. It has nearly international reach, as the US is the biggest market in the world and could apply these measures to imports too.”

He and the other petitioners have filed “a mountain’s worth” of scientific studies showing the impact of greenhouse gases on weather, which results in wildfires, heatwaves, severe drought, rising sea levels and increasingly acidified oceans.

The US has a recent history of attempts to regulate carbon dioxide under existing environmental legislation, as Congress has often proved reluctant to consider passing laws to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The former president, Barack Obama, who was unable to get his climate legislation through the Republican-dominated Congress, tried to use the Clean Air Act – another of the environmental achievements of the 1970s – to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power stations, but under Donald Trump the attempt was reversed.

The US Supreme Court, which has a strong Republican bias, is re-examining whether the EPA should have such carbon-regulating powers.

Viviani has also tried a similar tack before, submitting a legal petition in 2015 for carbon dioxide to be controlled under the TSCA to tackle ocean acidification. That failed, but he believes that the amendment to the legislation in 2016 offers a fresh basis on which to present the argument again.

Hansen said the new attempt was more likely to succeed, adding: “The TSCA is different. It’s better than the Clean Air Act (CAA). The CAA was a possible vehicle for a rising carbon fee, because the supreme court in Massachusetts vs EPA ruled that CO2 was a pollutant. However, there is a very strong suspicion that if the CAA is used that way, the present conservative supreme court will reverse that ruling. They can’t do that easily with the TSCA, which was passed by Congress and reaffirmed [in 2016] with bipartisan support.”

Alongside Viviani and Hansen, the other petitioners include: Lise Van Susteren, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at George Washington University; John Birks, an emeritus professor in atmospheric chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder; Richard Heede, of the Climate Accountability Institute; and the Climate Protection and Restoration Initiative.

Some climate campaigners have criticised Biden for a perceived lack of action on the climate crisis, despite the fact that he made it a priority in the early days of his presidency. The war in Ukraine and rising energy prices have prompted the White House to emphasise new gas extraction as an alternative to Russian supplies.

Viviani said: “President Biden is an empathic man; we hope he is also a brave man. We hope he will use both his empathy and bravery to pick up this tool he has in the TSCA, and use it to give hope that a solution will be found to the many millions of young people, and in fact all of us.”

Under the TSCA, the EPA has 90 days to consider and act upon the legal petition. The Guardian contacted the EPA for comment.

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rjzimmerman · 2 years

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Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

A federal judge this week rejected a third appeal by ExxonMobil in the 12-year legal battle over toxic emissions from one of the Texas-based energy giant’s Gulf Coast facilities.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld a $14.25 million fine—thought to be the largest-ever fine resulting from citizen enforcement of environmental law—in a lawsuit brought by environmental organizations against Exxon’s massive complex in Baytown, some 25 miles outside Houston.

The decision still doesn’t guarantee a conclusion to the long-running case, which Exxon may be able to appeal further.

“It’s frequently in the interest of a company to drag out cases for as long as possible to try and get the other side to give up, but we are not giving up,” said Josh Kratka, senior attorney at the National Environmental Law Center, which represented the plaintiffs in the trial. “We hope this is the end of it.”

The suit was first filed in 2010 by Environment Texas and the Sierra Club under the citizen suit provision of the Clean Air Act, which empowers civilians to sue polluters for violations of federal environmental law.

The plaintiffs originally alleged that 16,386 illegal air emissions events, which Exxon disclosed in its own reports, affected the health of communities around the Baytown refinery. A district court in 2017 ordered the Texas-based energy giant to pay almost $20 million.

Exxon appealed, arguing that not all of those violations could be directly traced to specific health problems. Upon review, the court reduced the number of actionable violations to 3,651 and reduced the fine to $14.25 million. Exxon appealed again, contesting the court’s legal standing and the size of the fine.

“This is a standard tactic. It just goes to show the lengths that polluters will go to to prevent true justice from coming forward,” said Stefania Tomaskovic, director of the Coalition for Environment, Equity and Resilience in Houston. “It’s always a struggle to protect our air when companies have so much money to hire lawyers and citizens are not as well resourced.”

#ExxonMobil #toxic emissions #air pollution #Clean Air Act

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cgandrews3 · 1 year

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randyite · 11 months

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#supreme court #trump #republicans #rethuglicans #scotus #religion #affirmative action #separation of church and state #clean air act #miranda #lgbt #lgbtq #gay #student loans #constitution #impeachment

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a-chaotically-small-lunta · 2 years

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Did the Supreme Court really just go “Oh the clean air act? We’ll let executives of the company determine what’s “bad emission amounts” is that Coolio?” NO NO NO NO. You dumb fuckers. Emissions from power plants (not clean power plants like wind power or solar power) pollute the air. If this is not restricted and is just let loose, say goodbye to normal weather baby! Cause listen, it’s not gonna just be hotter with climate change, oh no no NO! There won’t be a tornado season anymore, they’ll just happen whenever the atmosphere is in good condition to have one spin up. “What about snow?” It’ll still snow but it won’t be fun, you like snow in late April? Oh how about a blizzard like the one Texas went through where people died? Those sound fun? No? Well guess what happens when you fuck around with the climate and put more emissions out there. You fuck with the atmosphere, it’ll fuck you right back baby. Take it from me, I have a degree (bachelors but still) in Meteorology AND Climatology. Emissions are one of the top things that heavily contributes to climate change, (specifically burning fossil fuels), the other two top ones are farming (specifically animal farming) and cutting down trees. Since I know some people don’t really understand this kind of stuff here is a link to a little simulation. You can mess around with it and learn what happens when you mess with fossil fuel use and deforestation.

#the supreme court #Supreme Court #climate change #clean air act #climate #weather #I’m pissed #sorry to get a lil political but they fucked with something I know a decent amount about #they’re messing with climate shit while climate is being fucked? bad idea #also apologizies if anything I said was inaccurate #the weather stuff I know is right but the Supreme Court stuff I’m still a bit fuzzy on

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conspiring-limabean · 2 years

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Like how the repeal of Roe doesn't mean that Abortion is now illegal country-wide, the gutting of the EPA only means that the EPA itself cannot limit coal-based carbon emissions. While abhorrent and a huge loss in progression to fight climate change, as always your state and local legislators can still make a difference in addition to Congress being our only hope to limit CO2 on a federal level.

I saw a popular post going around saying that the only way to stop pollution would be for Congress to illegalize every substance individually, and I'm not saying that post is entirely false, but I don't know where they got that. Congress may be our only option to regulate things on a federal level, but environmental agencies still have control at the State and local levels. What this means is that, until/unless Congress steps in, areas which relied on the EPA to limit CO2 limits will now have to deploy legislation on their own while some areas already had preexisting legislation that will remain in force, such as California. There is no longer federal law placing a blanket ban on coal-based CO2 emissions across the country, but local authorities still have control over smaller areas.

This isn't just state legislation but also includes legislation per City and County, which just further emphasizes how important it is to vote in every single local election your area has. In the absence of the federal government's assistance, the legislators elected in your City, County and State will be the ones determining clean air in your area. As lower-level politicians than federal legislators, these are people that are far more easily influenced by organization and demands in your area, and are far more likely to hear your demands if you contact them.

Make no mistake, this is still a catastrophic loss considering coal-based carbon emissions contribute for as much as a fifth of global greenhouse gases--but I've seen a lot of posts wording it as if we are completely powerless to change it. Be accurately aware of how catastrophic it is and what our next steps could be to fix it. Vote, contribute to local organizations, contact your local legislators to make demands, and contribute to direct action/protests.

#current events #supreme court #EPA #clean air act

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pscottm · 2 years

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“The Supreme Court issued a decision limiting the power of regulatory agencies within the federal government, saying the Environmental Protection Agency overstepped its authority in 2015 when it tried to limit greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The EPA powers at issue are central to Mr. Biden’s climate agenda. With fragile majorities in the Senate and House, Democrats have limited ability to advance their platform through new legislation.”

HuffPost: Supreme Court delivers big blow to climate crisis.

#climate change #supreme court #emissions #clean air act

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mysticalamity · 2 years

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SCOTUS has now decided on the environment and the impacts that oil companies, drilling companies, and companies that produce products without thoroughly and safely disposing of the runoff and pollution that these enterprises make every single day. They decided to take the hands-off approach toward this very monumental point in time, we do not need to imagine what global warming looks like because WE ARE LIVING IN IT PRACTICALLY, we’ve seen the natural disasters, the droughts, and forest fires, the snowing especially when it snowed down south like when was it 2020/2021? So we need 10,000 signatures to take a stand for the Clean Air Act not only to help the environment but to also help protect the people who are living on this land that has had their lives irreversible changed because they are living on land that has caught the attention of these huge enterprises so now these enterprises do everything in their power to make that land uninhabitable, so of course, they hit the POC communities first, most notably Indigenous communities are experiencing an ongoing battle of driving these enterprises out of their land AND while trying to regain their rights to clean food, water, and rightful land back.

Flint, Michigan still does not have clean safe water after 8 years.

We need to protect this Act because this Act stands between us and living a true, healthy, clean life.

#black lives matter #native lives matter #asian lives matter #news #brown lives matter #clean air act #tiktok

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plethoraworldatlas · 2 months

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At the heart of the Clean Air Act (CAA), our nation’s most important law regulating climate and air pollution, sits a handful of misinterpreted, outdated guidance documents that—get this—are paradoxically preventing communities from breathing clean air.

Clearly, as the name alone suggests, these are not the results the lawmakers intended for the CAA. But today, issues with our backward air permitting system are averting climate progress and causing real-life impacts on air quality in unacceptably inequitable ways by disproportionately harming Black, Brown, and low-income communities.

If left unaddressed, we risk slowing or stalling the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), industrial decarbonization, and other critical efforts to create jobs and slash carbon pollution.

The law’s air permitting system has the potential to be an incredible tool since it covers every major industrial and power sector smokestack in the country. If, for example, the system required companies to shift toward the zero-emission technology that the IRA funds, it would transform our economy. But decades-old doctrines at the center of the CAA’s air permitting system are currently preventing the system from achieving its purpose: scale deployment of the cleanest technologies available at the time to protect people from pollution. And in some cases, this system is actually preventing cleaner, cost-competitive solutions from being adopted altogether.

#enviromentalism #ecology #us politics #clean air act #clean air #Permit system #air quality #inflation reduction act

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delicatelysublimeforester · 3 months

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Prime Minister Brian Mulroney: Canada's Greenest Environmental Prime Minister

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 2 years

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West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency strikes down a federal environmental regulation of power plants that never took effect, that the Biden administration has no intention of reinstating, and that would have accomplished absolutely nothing even if it had be enforced.

Nevertheless, the Court voted along ideological lines to strike down this regulation that the EPA drafted under authority granted by the Clean Air Act, claiming that it amounts to an “extraordinary” overreach by the EPA. And their decision has enormous implications both for the environment and for the federal government more broadly.

At the very least, the West Virginia decision strips the EPA of its authority to shift energy production away from dirty coal-fired plants and toward cleaner methods of energy production — although market forces have thus far accomplished much of this shift on their own, because coal-fired plants are often more expensive to operate than cleaner plants. The decision could also lead to additions limits on the EPA’s ability to regulate that industry going forward.

The West Virginia decision confirms something that has been implicit in the Supreme Court’s recent decisions governing federal agencies’ power to issue binding regulations under authority granted by Congress: When a majority of the Supreme Court disagrees with a regulation pushed out by a federal agency, the Court has given itself the power to veto that regulation — and it will do so by invoking something known as the “major questions doctrine.”

Under this doctrine, the Court explained in a 2014 opinion, “we expect Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’” Thus, if a majority of the Court deems a regulation to be too significant, it will strike it down unless Congress very explicitly authorized that particular regulation.

This doctrine comes from nowhere. Last week, the Court said that abortion is unprotected by the Constitution — leaning heavily on the fact that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution. But the the major questions doctrine is also mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. Nor can it be found in any statute. The justices made it up. And, at least during President Joe Biden’s administration, the Court has wielded it quite aggressively to veto regulations that the Court’s conservative majority finds objectionable.

Roberts’s majority opinion in West Virginia does put some flesh on the fairly bare bones the Justices have previously used to describe when they will declare something to be a “major question.” Roberts faults the EPA for issuing a novel kind of regulation pursuant to a “long-extant” statute that had not previously been used to justify similar actions. He claims that the EPA relied on an “ancillary provision” of the Clean Air Act, rather than a more central provision of that law. And he criticizes the EPA for issuing a regulation which resembles bills that Congress previously considered but did not enact.

But these judgments are divorced from the text of the Clean Air Act itself. And Roberts admits that the major questions doctrine can nuke a regulation even when there is a “colorable textual basis” supporting that regulation — that is, when the actual words of a federal law could support the action taken by a federal agency.

The bottom line after the West Virginia decision is that agencies may still exercise regulatory authority, but only subject to a judicial veto. The Supreme Court has effectively placed itself at the head of much of the executive branch of the federal government.

FEDERAL REGULATIONS, BRIEFLY EXPLAINED

When Congress wishes to regulate businesses or private individuals, it can do so in two ways. One way is that it can simply command a person or industry to conduct business in a specific way. Congress may, for example, order health insurers to cover people with preexisting conditions. It may require employers to pay a minimum wage. Or it could insist that all power plants to install a particular device that reduces carbon emissions.

The problem with this direct approach, however, is that when Congress issues such a specific command, it can only change that command by enacting a new federal law. Suppose, for example, that Congress had passed a law in 1978 requiring coal-fired plants to install a particular device to reduce pollution. That device would almost certainly be obsolete today. Indeed, it could potentially interfere with more recent technology that would do a much better job of limiting emissions.

So Congress also has the power to delegate regulatory authority to a federal agency: laying out a broad policy goal that the agency must try to solve, then giving the agency a fair amount of discretion to determine, in its own expert opinion, how to solve it. This allows federal law to be more adaptive, with regulations shifting as new facts justify updated rules.

Congress, for example, could not have known in 2010, when the Affordable Care Act became law, that a deadly new disease would emerge in 2019 that would paralyze much of the world economy until vaccines made it safe for most people to emerge from their homes. But COVID-19 vaccines are still covered by health insurance, partly because the Affordable Care Act contains a provision requiring the Department of Health and Human Services to maintain a list of vaccines that health insurers must cover — while also permitting HHS to add new vaccines to this list as new diseases and immunizations emerge.

The provision of the Clean Air Act at the heart of the West Virginia case functions similarly. It requires certain power plants to use the “best system of emission reduction” that can be achieved with currently available technology, while also accounting for factors like cost. The EPA, meanwhile, has the authority to determine what the “best system” is at any given moment, and it can issue new regulations requiring energy companies to adopt new systems as technology advances.

The Court’s decision in West Virginia does not strip the EPA of this authority entirely — the agency might still be able to require coal-fired plants to install certain devices, for example — but it drastically reduces the EPA’s power. And it warns the EPA — and every other federal agency — against using its regulatory power in new ways, lest the Supreme Court be tempted to invoke the major questions doctrine and veto the agency’s rule.

THE ACTUAL REGULATION AT ISSUE IN WEST VIRGINIA DID NOTHING AT ALL

One irony of Chief Justice Roberts’ declaration that West Virginia is an “extraordinary case” that requires the Supreme Court to exercise its self-given veto power over federal regulations is that the actual regulation at issue in the case didn’t amount to much of anything.

The case involves the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era effort to fight climate change, which was touted as the Obama administration’s most ambitious climate policy initiative when it was announced in 2015. Roberts’ opinion speaks of this plan in alarmist terms, pointing to seven-year-old projections which claimed that the plan “would entail billions of dollars in compliance costs,” “eliminate tens of thousands of jobs,” and “would cause retail electricity prices to remain persistently 10% higher in many States.”

Meanwhile, Obama’s EPA predicted that, by 2030, the Clean Power Plan would lower carbon emissions from power plants by about a third below where they stood in 2005.

But the Clean Power Plan never took effect; the Supreme Court voted along party lines in 2016 to temporarily block it, and it was later abandoned by the Trump administration. It also turns out that it wouldn’t have done anything even if it had been in effect.

That’s because the plan relied upon what Roberts labels “generation shifting” — shifting the production of energy from dirtier coal-fired plants to other, cleaner sources of energy. And the energy industry didn’t actually need a government regulation to force it to shift away from coal-fired plants because the oldest, dirtiest plants are more expensive to operate than cleaner plants. So the dirtiest plants were retired.

The energy industry wound up achieving the Clean Power Plan’s 2030 emissions reduction goals by 2019, not because of the heavy hand of regulation, but because of good ol’ free market capitalism. (Coal executives also complained that unrelated Obama-era rules restricting mercury emissions also led them to shut down coal plants.)

Nevertheless, West Virginia deems the Clean Power Plan to be a sin against the major questions doctrine because the impotent plan attempted to “substantially restructure the American energy market” by changing how electricity would be produced. The holding of West Virginia is that the Clean Air Act “did not clearly authorize the EPA to engage in a ‘generation shifting approach’ to the production of energy in this country.”

Again, this is a policy judgment. The text of the Clean Air Act instructs the EPA to determine the “best system of emission reduction.” It does not say that the “best system” cannot involve shifting the energy industry away from coal and toward cleaner power.

But, in inventing the major questions doctrine out of thin air, the Supreme Court gave itself the power to make these kinds of policy judgements.

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rjzimmerman · 2 years

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Excerpt from this story from Grist:

The Clean Air Act gives the U.S. government broad power to protect public health by regulating major sources of pollutants. Rules developed under the law have, for example, required power plants to install filters and scrubbers to limit the release of sulfur dioxide and particulate matter. The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, has also used the law to phase lead out of gasoline and issue vehicle standards to reduce tailpipe emissions.

But there’s one significant source of pollution that the agency has so far ignored: all of the consumer appliances that burn natural gas or fuel oil in homes and businesses. The direct combustion of fossil fuels like these within the country’s buildings is responsible for roughly 10 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. On Tuesday, the Sierra Club and 25 other environmental and public health groups filed a petition asking the EPA to use its authority to crack down on fuel-burning appliances.

“Emissions from buildings have a harmful, and frankly scary, impact on human health and contribute significantly to the climate crisis,” Amneh Minkara, the deputy director of the Sierra Club’s building electrification campaign, said in a written statement accompanying the announcement. “It is the duty of the EPA to keep the American public safe from breathing in these pollutants.”

While the Department of Energy regulates many home appliances in order to promote the most energy-efficient models, there are no regulations that aim to mitigate the health effects of pollutants from these devices, like nitrogen oxides, or NOx — a precursor to smog. The petition asks the EPA to phase in NOx performance standards for furnaces and water heaters, eventually landing on a zero-emissions standard by 2030. This would effectively ban the manufacture of these appliances altogether, forcing building owners to purchase alternative heating devices powered solely by electricity, like heat pumps.

#EPA #Clean Air Act #fossil fuel appliances #electrification

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