The Democrat-led climate bill signed into law Aug. 16 grew the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority over energy after the Supreme Court limited it in June, the bill’s text shows, by defining carbon dioxide as an air pollutant.
The court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA limited the EPA’s regulatory power and found that Congress had not authorized the agency under the Clean Air Act (CAA) to impose greenhouse gas emissions caps under the now-replaced Clean Power Plan to force a national transition away from coal power. [bold, links added]
Several of the Inflation Reduction Act‘s sections define the term “greenhouse gas” as “the air pollutants carbon dioxide, hydrofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride.”
Democrats who contributed to the climate bill and legal experts said it clearly authorizes the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases and push for renewable energy adoption by defining fossil fuel-generated carbon dioxide as an “air pollutant” in an amended Clean Air Act, according to The New York Times.
The language was opposed by Senate Republicans but survived their attempts to erase it, the outlet reported.
“[The EPA is] gonna try to use that as authorization that they can regulate carbon dioxide from coal plants because it has this casual mention of carbon dioxide and air pollutant in the same sentence,” JunkScience.com founder and Trump EPA transition team member Steve Milloy told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“I don’t think that that’s gonna fly, ultimately, but a lot of damage can be done in the meantime. Because it’s clear that there’s no definition there, it’s just sort of in a list, and it’s casually mentioned. There’s no section that says carbon dioxide is an air pollutant under the Clean Air Act.”
Milloy called the EPA’s rule for fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) to tighten air quality standards “a backdoor way of regulating climate.”
“They’ll probably do the same thing with ozone, and then they’ll use this authority somehow,” he said of the climate bill’s language on carbon dioxide.
“EPA is gonna use every hook it thinks it has to crack down on greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why that definition was put in, because the Supreme Court said you need congressional authorization, and they don’t have any congressional authorization, not one. They have none, and that section doesn’t really give it to them, but they’re gonna pretend it does.”
Milloy said the “leftist” D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals might accept the Democrats’ argument.
American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Benjamin Zycher told the DCNF said it was unclear if the language in the climate bill directing funds to deal with carbon dioxide as a “pollutant” “satisfies the explicit delegation requirement for major questions as decided by the Supreme Court in West Virginia v. EPA.
“The argument that CO2 is an air pollutant under the traditional definition in the CAA is silly,” he said. “EPA is required under the CAA to promulgate an ambient air quality standard (AAQS) that ‘protects the public health’ with an ‘adequate margin of safety’ for an ‘air pollutant’ that EPA determines to be endangering the public health and safety. EPA made that determination for CO2 in 2009; but that was and remains preposterous, as there is no evidence that increasing CO2 (or CO2-equivalent GHG) concentrations are ‘endangering’ anyone, or creating a ‘crisis.’”
Read rest at Daily Caller
Democrats+ Globalists=Traitors
Bring Contempt of Court Charges against the DNC
Why? The Court ruled that the restriction of CO2 was because it was not mandated within the EPA (wasn’t specifically labelled under their legislation).
Now it appears to written in.
Very clever how they stuck CO2 into the bill.
Supreme Court can’t overrule it now.
Just write it out in the future
Unless I missed something, I thought Sen. Caputo from West Virginia had challenged this language in the reconciliation process & that the Senate Parlimentarian had asked it be stricken from the legislation. Are we talking about the same thing? I thought reconciliation could only include budgetary matters & that policy such as this was not part of Senate rules. Something looks a bit “fishy’ (here) if this was included in the recently passed IRA…
The life process that makes the environment green is called photosynthesis. Its formula is sunlight plus CO2 plus H2O converts sunlight energy into the high energy sugar that fuels life, and as a byproduct, the atmospheric oxygen – all of it – that the entire Animal Kingdom depends on to exist. It is arguably the most important living chemistry on earth. All life dies without CO2. Because life on earth is ENTIRELY MADE OF LITTLE CARBON SACKS OF WATER CALLED CELLS. All life. If grade school education was managed as competently as my teachers did, every kid who graduated grade school would know this. Yet rather, they are taught that life essential CO2 is pollution! Complete nonsense. The exact opposite is true. Any level of CO2 below 2,000ppm is a starvation level low. We know this because of the science of CO2 fertility. Greenhouse growers ADD CO2 to their greenhouses at rates up to four times today’s atmosphere to make their plants greener, stronger, healthier, and larger. I’m a farmer with a biology degree, B.Sc.Advanced (biology). The same hundred year old understanding of CO2’s role in life should be taught to more than just grade school kids. It should be taught to journalists and politicians. That way we could eliminate the ridiculous notion that more CO2 is a bad thing. The reality is that the fossil fuel’s recycling of CO2 back into the environment it came from is the greenest thing human beings have ever done for the environment.
Everyone alive inhales air containing CO2 at maybe 400+ ppm, and yet our lungs contain CO2 at 100 times that level. It’s not a pollutant. If it was, animals would not exist.