“Against challenges from Texas, 15 other states, and almost 100 petitioners from industry, the D.C. Circuit has upheld the EPA’s legal foundation for regulation of greenhouse gases.

“The D.C. Circuit’s ruling for EPA repeatedly relies on the deeply flawed, policy-laden, and now outdated 2007 U.S. Supreme Court opinion, Massachusetts v. EPA. In that ruling, a 5-4 majority of the Court all but made the Endangerment Finding that man-made carbon dioxide endangers human health and welfare by causing global warming. However, subsequent disclosures and further advances in climate science have revealed fundamental flaws in the official science behind global warming alarmism.

“Regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and the speculative science on which the EPA relies ultimately mandates an 85 percent reduction of these gases – a level of carbon dioxide in the late 19th century before modern industrialization began. The EPA admits that regulation would grow from a current universe of 14,000 sources to more than six million, including schools and homes.

“Congress now has a responsibility to reform the Clean Air Act to remove the deference most courts give to EPA’s technical judgment and to refine the definition of air pollution in the Act. Without meaningful limits on the EPA’s discretionary power, its purview morphs from meaningful environmental protection into centralized economic planning.

“Decisions of the magnitude of greenhouse gas regulation belong to our elected members of Congress, who have repeatedly rejected such regulatory caps. Only our elected representatives are constitutionally suited to make such monumental national policy decisions as dictating reductions of ubiquitous components of biological processes.”

Kathleen Hartnett White is director of the Armstrong Center for Energy and Environment at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. She was commissioner and chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality from 2001 to 2007.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin.

Primary website: www.TexasPolicy.com
Facebook page: www.Facebook.com/TexasPublicPolicyFoundation
Twitter feed: www.Twitter.com/TPPF

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