The Obama administration today cleared away the last legal obstacle to regulation of greenhouse gas emissions by the Environmental Protection Agency by issuing a formal declaration that they pose a threat to human health and the environment.
The gases, which include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride, are emitted by the tailpipes of motor vehicles, coal-burning power plants and a wide variety of other industrial facilities.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that EPA is obligated under the federal Clean Air Act to classify carbon dioxide as a potentially dangerous air pollutant. Carbon dioxide is the most common of several greenhouse gases that are contributing to the warming of Earth's atmosphere.
“These long-overdue findings cement 2009’s place in history as the year when the United States Government began addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution and seizing the opportunity of clean-energy reform,” EPA administrator Lisa M. Jackson said at a press conference in Washington, D.C. today.
The finding that greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and welfare, as well as a separate finding that their emission from motor vehicle tailpipes contribute to the accumulation of those gases in the atmosphere, is not itself a regulation.
Instead, they are prerequisites to the agency's obligation to issue regulations aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The nation's principal air quailty protection law requires EPA to issue the rules once a conclusion, based on a reasonable assessment of current scientific knowledge, that a pollutant poses a risk to human health and welfare has been reached.
Among the impact of the findings will be the finalizing of regulations, crafted in coordination with the U.S. Department of Transportation, limiting tailpipe emissions and requiring increased minimum average fleet fuel efficiency for all vehicles sold in the country.
Congress is considering legislation that would supersede EPA's regulatory powers. The House of Representatives has approved a bill that would set emission limits and create a system that would allow polluters to trade with each other for credits necessary to emit greenhouse gases.
That measure is stalled in the U.S. Senate.
The EPA's finding comes on the first day of a United Nations-sponsored summit on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark. Representatives from 192 nations gathered to work toward an agreement that would impose a ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions around the world and begin to reverse the increase in the planet's average land-and-sea surface temperature caused by anthropogenic atmospheric warming.
The Obama administration announced in September a proposed rule that would limit greenhouse gas emissions from all sources that release at least 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide, or its equivalent, per year.
The Clean Air Act requires that emission limits be imposed on all stationary facilities that discharge at least 250 tons of regulated air pollutants into the atmosphere each year.
Comments
Everyone.. Please stop breathing because its going to not only kill your family and friends.. but also your pets and eventualy yourself!... Apparently Mother Nature has been going about life totaly the wrong way since the Earth began and Obama's Admin. will teach her what it is she did wrong....
Obama and his entire group of tarts need to go back to living in their own butts and leave the rest of the world alone. Im suprised they have all made it to adulthood alive
I wonder if they understand that deadzones, which create methane, are a byproduct of over-fertilization of corn. I hope so. We need to clean up this pile of crap we call America before it is too late.
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