ARLINGTON, Va. — The Environmental Protection Agency will move forward with long-overdue air rules that have come under attack from Republicans and utilities, the agency’s top air quality official said Monday.
Gina McCarthy, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, said the Obama administration has faced “a backlog of rulemakings” that are required under the Clean Air Act but weren’t implemented on time or were overturned by the courts.
In July the agency finalized its Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, which replaces a George W. Bush-era rule that a court struck down in 2008 for not being strong enough. And in March the agency proposed a power-plant rule, known as “Utility MACT,” that she said includes mercury-emissions reductions the agency was supposed to address more than 20 years ago.
“We are in the final stretches of rules that are significantly important for public health. We must continue, and we will,” McCarthy said at the University of North Dakota’s annual air quality conference in Arlington.
Her comments come as Republicans in Congress have passed legislation that would delay those rules by several years each and force the agency to weaken them.
Texas also has asked a federal court to block the cross-state rule, which requires power plants in the Lone Star State and 26 others to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which are soot- and smog-forming pollutants the EPA says can harm health in downwind states. McCarthy said the new rule corrects the shortcomings with the Bush-era rule. The agency has repeatedly said the cross-state rule won’t cause the power plant closures some critics, including several Texans, are predicting.
The agency recently proposed technical changes to the cross-state rule. The revisions reduce Texas’ required emissions reductions and remove a cap on emissions trading between states for the first two years of the rule.
But Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott recently vowed to press forward with a lawsuit challenging the cross-state rule, saying the changes were “minor,” and 31 of the state’s 32 U.S. House members said last week they were concerned the revised rule could still cause electricity blackouts in the state.
Texas is also part of a suit that seeks to delay issuance of a final Utility MACT rule. EPA has pushed back its issuance date from Nov. 16 to Dec. 16, citing need to review nearly 1 million comments the agency received on its proposed rule.
The EPA understands the economy “is not as robust as any of us would like it to be,” McCarthy said. But she said that private-sector jobs have grown 86 percent and gross-domestic product has grown over 200 percent in 40 years of the Clean Air Act, even as total emissions of six main air pollutants regulated under the law fell by 63 percent.
“If all you listen to is doomsday predictions, then you would have never done any major environmental law ever in this country,” McCarthy added. She said utilities didn’t suffer the “slow death” they said would result from the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments’ permanent cap on acid-rain-forming emissions.
