“Under the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, EPA is
required to regulate emissions of 189 listed toxic air
pollutants. On July 16, 1992, EPA published a list of
source categories that emit one or more of these air
toxics. For listed categories of “major” sources (those
that emit 10 tons annually or more of a listed pollutant
or 25 tons or more of a combination of pollutants)and
certain “area” sources (those that emit hazardous air
pollutants below the major source threshold), the Clean
Air Act requires EPA to develop standards that will
require the application of stringent air pollution
controls, known as maximum achievable control technology
(MACT).”
This reference will be the basis of a suit to be filed likely concurrent with the effective date of today’s announcement.
An injuction will probably be immediately prayed for.
A technical detail: What you quoted relates to hazardous air pollutants and MACT standards. EPA will be regulating GHGs as criteria pollutants and applying BACT standards. Even so, you are 100% correct on where this is headed legally.
The threshold for regulation of criteria pollutants under the CAA is 100 or 250 tons/year, but the regulations proposed today use a threshold of 25,000 tons/year. Using a 250 tpy threshold would require 6.1 million business to get federal operating permits. By changing the threshold, only about 14,000 permits will need to be issued.
EPA doesn’t have the authority to change the threshold that was mandated by the Clean Air Act legislation, but they are going to try.
I spent some time in greenie-blog-land this evening. It seems the greens are ecstatic that CO2 emissions are down 9% in 2009 due to the economic downturn. The cheerleading goes like this: We are already halfway to the GHG reduction goal of 20% by 2020! We can do this and it’s going to be EASY! Go green!