scholarly journals The Rise and Fall of Clean Air Act Climate Policy

2021 ◽  
pp. 69
Author(s):  
Nathan Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Climate Policy ◽  
Environmental Protection Agency ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Clean Air Act ◽  
President Obama ◽  
White House ◽  
Climate Regulation ◽  
Great Hope ◽  
American Law ◽  
Clean Air

The Clean Air Act has proven to be one of the most successful and durable statutes in American law. After the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, there was great hope that the Act could be brought to bear on climate change, the most pressing current environmental challenge of our time. Massachusetts was fêted as the most important environmental case ever decided, and, upon it, the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama built a sweeping program of greenhouse gas regulations, aimed first at emissions from road vehicles, and later at fossil fuel power plants. It was the most ambitious federal climate policy in American history. Now, twelve years after Massachusetts was decided, that program is in ruins, largely repealed or weakened by the climate-skeptic Trump administration. Massachusetts has not provided a foundation for durable climate policy. The roots of the Clean Air Act’s climate policy failures lie not just in changes in political leadership, but also in a Supreme Court majority increasingly skeptical of not just climate regulation but of the administrative state in general. This and other barriers will persist regardless of who occupies the White House. This article explores why climate regulation under the Clean Air Act has been so much more fragile than other regulations under the statute, which actors bear responsibility for its failures, and what prospects remain for future federal climate policy.

scholarly journals The Rise and Fall of Clean Air Act Climate Policy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Climate Policy ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Clean Air Act ◽  
President Obama ◽  
White House ◽  
Climate Regulation ◽  
Great Hope ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
American Law ◽  
Clean Air

The Clean Air Act has proven over nearly fifty years to be one of the most successful and durable statutes in American law. After the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, there was great hope that it could be brought to bear on climate change, the most pressing current environmental challenge of our time. Massachusetts was fêted as the most important environmental case ever decided, and upon it the EPA under President Obama built a sweeping program of greenhouse gas regulations, aimed first at emissions from road vehicles, and later at fossil fuel power plants. It was the most ambitious federal climate policy in American history. Now, twelve years after Massachusetts was decided, that program is in ruins, largely repealed or weakened by the climate-skeptic Trump administration. Massachusetts has not provided a foundation for durable climate policy. The roots of Clean Air Act climate policy’s failures lie not just in changes in political leadership, but with a majority on the Supreme Court increasingly skeptical of not just climate regulation specifically, but of the administrative state in general. This and other barriers will persist regardless of who is in the White House. This article explores why climate regulation under the Clean Air Act has been so much more fragile than other regulations under the statute, who bears responsibility for its failures, and what prospects remain for future federal climate policy.

Valuing Clean Air

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Halvorson
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Protection ◽  
Environmental Protection Agency ◽  
Environmental Concern ◽  
Clean Air Act ◽  
Responsibility To Protect ◽  
Elected Officials ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Monetary Approach ◽  
Clean Air ◽  
Roll Back

The passage of the Clean Air Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 marked a sweeping transformation in American politics. In a few short years, the environmental movement pushed Republican and Democratic elected officials to articulate a right to clean air as part of a bevy of new federal guarantees. Charged with delivering on those promises, the EPA represented a bold assertion that the federal government had a responsibility to protect the environment, the authority to command private business to reduce their pollution, and the capacity to dictate how they did so. But revolutions are always contested and the starburst of environmental concern that propelled the Clean Air Act and the EPA coincided with economic convulsions that shook the liberal state to its core. As powerful businesses pressed to roll back regulations, elected officials from both parties questioned whether the nation could keep its environmental promises. Pushing on, the EPA adopted a monetized approach to environmental value that sat at odds with environmentalist notions of natural rights but provided a critical shield for the agency’s rulemaking, as environmental protection came to serve as a key battleground in larger debates over markets, government, and public welfare. The EPA’s success and the potential limits of its monetary approach are evident in the very air we breathe today—far cleaner and healthier as a result of the EPA’s actions, but holding new threats in a rapidly changing climate.

scholarly journals What Do Economists Have to Say about the Clean Air Act 50 Years after the Establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency?

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Currie ◽  
Reed Walker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Air Quality ◽  
Environmental Protection ◽  
Environmental Protection Agency ◽  
Clean Air Act ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Research ◽  
Protection Agency ◽  
The Past ◽  
Clean Air

Air quality in the United States has improved dramatically over the past 50 years in large part due to the introduction of the Clean Air Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce it. This article is a reflection on the 50-year anniversary of the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency, describing what economic research says about the ways in which the Clean Air Act has shaped our society—in terms of costs, benefits, and important distributional concerns. We conclude with a discussion of how recent changes to both policy and technology present new opportunities for researchers in this area.

Struggling for Air

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Revesz ◽  
Jack Lienke
Keyword(s):  
Air Pollution ◽  
Electricity Market ◽  
Environmental Protection Agency ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Power Sector ◽  
Industrial Facilities ◽  
Major Energy Source ◽  
Clean Air ◽  
Emission Limits

Since the beginning of the Obama Administration, conservative politicians have railed against the President's "War on Coal." As evidence of this supposed siege, they point to a series of rules issued by the Environmental Protection Agency that aim to slash air pollution from the nation's power sector . Because coal produces far more pollution than any other major energy source, these rules are expected to further reduce its already shrinking share of the electricity market in favor of cleaner options like natural gas and solar power. But the EPA's policies are hardly the "unprecedented regulatory assault " that opponents make them out to be. Instead, they are merely the latest chapter in a multi-decade struggle to overcome a tragic flaw in our nation's most important environmental law. In 1970, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, which had the remarkably ambitious goal of eliminating essentially all air pollution that posed a threat to public health or welfare. But there was a problem: for some of the most common pollutants, Congress empowered the EPA to set emission limits only for newly constructed industrial facilities, most notably power plants. Existing plants, by contrast, would be largely exempt from direct federal regulation-a regulatory practice known as "grandfathering." What lawmakers didn't anticipate was that imposing costly requirements on new plants while giving existing ones a pass would simply encourage those old plants to stay in business much longer than originally planned. Since 1970, the core problems of U.S. environmental policy have flowed inexorably from the smokestacks of these coal-fired clunkers, which continue to pollute at far higher rates than their younger peers. In Struggling for Air, Richard L. Revesz and Jack Lienke chronicle the political compromises that gave rise to grandfathering, its deadly consequences, and the repeated attempts-by presidential administrations of both parties-to make things right.

The Doer

2021 ◽  
pp. 40-69
Author(s):  
Charles Halvorson
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Environmental Protection Agency ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Public Welfare ◽  
Environmental Interventions ◽  
White House ◽  
The Public ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
Clean Air

The creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 to administer the Clean Air Act of 1970 and a bevy of other ambitious new environmental interventions marked a high point in Americans’ belief in the capacity of the federal government to intervene in the economy to improve the public welfare. While Richard Nixon intended the EPA to simply implement policies that would be formulated elsewhere, the complexity of developing and enforcing functional policies that could achieve the Clean Air Act’s mandates made the agency’s regulations increasingly key to determining what pollution control looked like in the lives of ordinary Americans and the operations of American businesses. This recognition of the power in implementation sent environmental advocates, business representatives, and White House advisors scrambling to find ways of influencing the decision making of the new agency at the heart of the nation’s environmental governance regime.

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