No more clean air for you!

The United States is looking more and more like Alice-in-Wonderland land!

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled yesterday that the utility industry was right -- the Environmental Protection Agency had overstepped its bounds with its Clean Air Interstate Rule in 2005.

Shortly thereafter, the EPA administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, said the EPA had no authority to regulate greenhouse gases under existing law. According to the AP, Johnson's statement "reinforced a message that the Bush administration has been sending for months: that it does not intend to impose mandatory controls on the emissions that cause climate change."

Johnson, in spite of his comment, is appalled, and "extremely disappointed" with the ruling of the court, "because it's overturning one of the most significant and health-protective rules in our nation's history." Then, being a Bush man, turned right around that said the the Clean Air Act and similar laws were "ill-suited" to the arduous process of regulating greenhouse gases.


Like so many things in the Bush administration, the whole issue is very confusing, when it should be straight-forward. Bush has never, ever wanted mandatory controls on greenhouse gases or any other pollutants! Whatever laws were put into place were nothing more than a sham designed to fool the public into thinking that Bush gave a damn.


In March of 2005, the EPA issued the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) which capped emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides in the large eastern states. It was estimated that "When fully implemented, CAIR will reduce SO2 emissions in these states by over 70 percent and NOx emissions by over 60 percent. This will result in $85 to $100 billion in visibility benefits per year by 2015 and will substantially reduce premature mortality in the eastern United States."

"A closely related action is the EPA Clean Air Mercury Rule, the first ever federally-mandated requirements that coal-fired electric utilities reduce their emissions of mercury."


Just a few months later,, Congress passed the Clean Air Act of 2005, a blatant attempt by conservatives to undermine the EPA's Clean Air Interstate Rule. This was a revision that made it easier for polluters to pollute and for communities to ignore their own pollution. In April of 2005, The New York Times reported that the energy bill (which included a revision to the Clean Air Act) would, "If it becomes law, ...make one of the most significant changes to the Clean Air Act in 15 years, allowing communities whose air pollution comes from hundreds of miles away to delay meeting national air quality standards until their offending neighbors clean up their own air."

Those who favored the measure claimed it "would give state and local governments the flexibility and discretion they urgently need to deal with air pollution from distant sources. Otherwise, they would have to impose much stricter limits on pollution from local sources, including power plants, factories and automobiles.

"But House members who fought against the measure, and other opponents, say flexibility and discretion are just other words for delay, saving money for industry and posing risks for millions of people living where the air does not meet health-based standards."

In other words the Clean Air Act, should rightly have been named the "Dirty Air Act."

And it was based on the same logic as used by the man who refused to clean up the soot and ash falling on his house from his neighbor's burning of trash until his neighbor stopped burning trash (which his neighbor had no intention of doing). Thus the man and his family contracted a variety of diseases from all this crap falling upon them, which could have been mitigated, in part, by cleaning up his own premises.


Now all of this is moot as the court has ruled the EPA can't make EPA rules, and the little bit of environmental protection provided by those rules, weakened by the Clean Air Act, are history!