The Cross-State Air Pollution Rule.
B' Spokes: This is an interesting read if you are interested in clean air and what the EPA can do about the lack of it.*****************************************************************************************************************************
BY MAX KENNERLY, ESQ., Litigation and Trial
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The EPA finalized their plan, in August 2011, known as the Transport Rule or the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule. It’s a great program, one that will help avoid tens of thousands of premature deaths and illnesses — including over 400,000 cases of aggravated asthma over the next two years in the Eastern United States, something of not-so-slight importance to me while I sit here typing and listening to one of my daughters coughing — and reap hundreds of billions of dollars in public health benefits. Every dollar of costs in the CSAPR will be made up by a hundred dollars in public health benefits.
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...As Judge Kavanaugh concluded:
[T]he Clean Air Act affords States the initial opportunity to implement reductions required by
EPA under the good neighbor provision. But here, when EPA quantified States’ good neighbor
obligations, it did not allow the States the initial opportunity to implement the required reductions
with respect to sources within their borders. Instead, EPA quantified States’ good neighbor
obligations and simultaneously set forth EPA-designed Federal Implementation Plans, or
FIPs, to implement those obligations at the State level. By doing so, EPA departed from its
consistent prior approach to implementing the good neighbor provision and violated the Act.
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Re-read Section 110 of the Clean Air Act and see if you can figure out how on earth they reached that result. The States aren’t entitled to any “initial opportunity” at all, because the EPA can cut those three years short if it so feels. Moreover, the States already had their “initial opportunity” and they failed to use it, so the EPA did exactly what the Clean Air Act required: it made its own Federal plan. That’s what the statute says, and that’s what the Court should have followed; instead, the Court created a completely new procedure, literally two decades after the fact, to punt the case further down the field and delay the regulations even longer.
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<a href="http://www.litigationandtrial.com/2012/10/articles/series/special-comment/federalist-society-judicial-activism-by-federalist-society-members-on-the-d-c-circuit/">http://www.litigationandtrial.com/2012/10/articles/series/special-comment/federalist-society-judicial-activism-by-federalist-society-members-on-the-d-c-circuit/</a>;
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