Obama Administration Moves to Slash Smokestack Greenhouse Pollution

The Environmental Protection Agency has released its first major rule proposal to slash greenhouse gas pollution from large industrial facilities and power plants around the country.

It's the first federal move toward regulating heat-trapping gases from stationary sources; tougher auto emissions standards were introduced earlier in the year. According to EPA, the rule fits in with its authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate air pollutants, and will stand up to legal challenges.

Under the new rule, new or significantly modified facilities would be required to get pollution permits if they emit 25,000 tons or more of carbon dioxide and five other climate-changing pollutants. These facilities would be required to use the "best available control technologies" (called "BACT" in enviro-wonkese) to filter their emissions.

This threshold, which would affect around 14,000 heavy industry and energy-generating facilities, is around 100 times greater than the regulatory triggers for other air pollutants known to hurt human health and the environment, such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. It is large enough to effectively remove small and medium-scale businesses from the regulation's scope.

Critics of the regulations have been spinning "doomsday scenarios, with EPA regulating everything from cows to the local Dunkin' Donuts," said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson at a press conference this afternoon."Let's be clear: That's not going to happen. We have carefully crafted the regulation to exempt most small and medium sized businesses," while targeting emitters where it will have the greatest positive impact on curbing global warming.

EPA will work with both state regulators and facility operators to figure out how to best assess the control technologies being used to filter out or otherwise contain the greenhouse pollutants, Jackson said.

Asked how the rule would fit into the House or Senate climate bills, Jackson emphasized that she supports a legislative solution to carbon regulation.

"I firmly believe that economy-wide legislation is the best way to spur our entire economy, to put a price on carbon that will unleash the private sector," Jackon said, "and power it to move forward [on clean energy] by literally leaps and bounds."

In the meantime, the agency is both committed and "compelled" to use its authority under the Clean Air Act to curbing greenhouse pollution, said Jackson. "We've also been smart," she said. "The technical work that EPA will have to do on technology is entirely consistent with work that would have to be done if new legislation is passed.

"So we're not losing any time, we're not adding any workload. We're simply using existing authorities, while we wait, hopefully, for new authorities to come as well."

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