> EPA regulation is not going to reduce wildfires.
Not in the US so I'm perhaps missing some context related to which bodies are responsible for which regulation but... why can't EPA regulation reduce wildfires?
EPA regulation is not going to reduce wildfires. Conflating it's pollution measurements with those from non-industrial sources just makes EPA's job harder and less meaningful.
Sorry, the sentence is ambiguous. That’s exactly what the EPA can do. What I meant to say is the EPA can’t use its authority to tell coal plants to install particulate scrubbers, which it has, to go and tell the whole industry to stop using coal.
> I explicitly said that if you think it isn't the EPA's job, then it should be someone else's job, and not just ignored. How do you think this could be tackled?
I did not explicitly say whether it should be the EPA's job or not. The data being nixed is at the local level. No one said it should be ignored at higher levels.
> Also, if you have read the article, you could see that Ohio and Pennsylvania were low on the list, with <10 days excluded. California and New Mexico have >50, and that smoke ain't coming from Canada, so your point is deceptive...
Sorry, but it is not deceptive. You just seem to fail to understand there can be local level data useful for regulating local companies and macro level data for getting a better overall picture. The article was specifically talking about lower than state level. Should a forest or industrial fire two counties over ruin another county? At least for California, I would imagine the locals have great motivation to have something they have no control over stricken from their record since the state more than likely uses EPA numbers in ways that could hurt them.
> Congress can still pass a law empowering EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Congress gave the EPA broad discretion that it could have revoked -- using your argument -- at any moment. This issue has been bouncing around for over a decade, and Congress has systematically declined to do so.
> There's a whole bunch of wrong rolled up here. The regulations were about how to stop CO2 from polluting the atmosphere. From there, you try to play Senator CS to shift this into some sort of weird "delegating an industry" language.
> But in the end it was all about regulating CO2.
The regulations were about how to stop things OTHER than CO2 from polluting the atmosphere without destroying the US economy. Things like Sulfur Dioxide and fly ash.
CO2 may fall under the language as written, and it may be appropriate for the EPA to regulate it, but that was not the central example of an airborne pollutant back in the 70s when this was written (Or 90s, when it was amended).
>Congress didn't pass a law and disappear. If Congress felt that the EPA was misinterpreting the language of the Clean Air Act it could have passed a law limiting the agency's powers.
It is not congresses job to enforce the law by writing new laws.
I was going to post this exact same quote. It is in my clipboard.
Controversial note: When politicians talk about defunding the EPA, people get upset. When the EPA pulls stunts like this, it makes you question their purpose. Seriously, why have regulators that "tip off" the very companies that they are supposed to be regulating?
> A perfectly legitimate case can be made to modify some EPA regulations, but when that reasonable position is characterized as "eviscerating the EPA", well then we have another problem
> Doesn't requiring operators of coal plants to produce less electricity have the effect of reducing emissions from power plants a task that was given to the EPA.
Sure, along with other undesirable effects. But just as it is a mistake to decide what authority they have based on just their name, it would also be a mistake to do so based on just a one–sentence summary. We really should be quoting out of the enabling legislation.
Suffice to say that this legislation is long and complex, but it specifically gives the EPA the authority to mandate design improvements to new power plants (prior to construction) so that they will operate at the best possible efficiency, and also the authority to mandate the installation of new systems to reduce the pollution put out by both existing plants and new ones. This has historically been things like scrubbers to remove pollutants from the waste stream. Think of new hardware devices that you can add to a plant or a factory that reduce the pollution while maintaining their function.
The EPA tried to argue that they had devised a “system” under the meaning of the law that allowed them to shift power generation from coal to gas or renewable power. The Court pointed out that this would gut the word of all useful meaning, and that it would give the EPA the power to unilaterally decide the entire industrial policy of the country. They would be able to use the same language to simply ban almost anything they wanted, and it’s pretty clear that Congress never intended that. The EPA could use that new authority to reduce pollution by banning virtually all industrial activity, causing it all to be done in other countries, for example.
There is another interesting aspect of the enabling legislation. It requires the EPA to investigate multiple systems that achieve the goal of reducing some specific pollutant from some specific source (such as soot from a power plant or whatever), then to determine how much reduction the best of those systems would achieve. Then instead of mandating that everyone has to install that specific system, they are allowed to mandate that everyone must achieve the same reduction by some means. This gives the operators a chance to beat the EPA on either cost or performance, and avoids forced mistakes. If the EPA accidentally selects the second–best system rather than the best, nobody is forced to use a sub–par means of reducing the pollutant.
However, in the case of the EPA’s new generating–shifting “system”, everybody would be required to participate in the same way for it to work. The opinion states: “By contrast, and by design, there is no control a coal plant operator can deploy to attain the emissions limits established by the Clean Power Plan.”
> If the EPA can legally grant states the ability to set their own emissions, why can't it revoke it or roll it back?
The government isn't allowed to change policies they've already created unless there is a compelling reason to. Otherwise every government policy would completely change every two years after each election.
The comment in question was "EPA regulations are way out of control." That's not a Trump thing, the sentiment has been around for decades in mainstream American politics. And the entire EPA has a decent handle on the regulations, so they are obviously in control, even if they're extremely bad. So I'm not sure it's meant as a statement of fact. It's meant as a statement of principle. That's what I meant when I said the audience for the statement isn't saying "I'm personally disappointed in EPA regulation #N", they're saying "The EPA is doing it totally wrong".
It also seems like the EPA has the power to accept or deny requests:
> In total, local regulators made note of almost 700 exceptional events. The EPA agreed to adjust the data on 139 of them.
So the EPA is only making adjustments for 20% of the events, and it seems like the EPA has the ultimate authority here. Doesn’t seem like there’s an issue.
I think I’d take issue with the article calling this a loophole when it’s exactly how the law was designed to operate.
If I had to take the opposite stance I would say that our lungs and bodies can’t tell the difference where the pollution comes from. Perhaps a state with more frequent wildfires does need to have more stringent human-made emissions standards than states that have few wildfires to keep the overall air quality at an acceptable level.
As an analogy, a state with more snowfall might need to spend more money on snow removal and road resurfacing. We don’t just throw up our arms and say “sorry we aren’t doing anything about it because it isn’t the state’s fault.”
To be fair, the audience for that comment isn't aware of _any_ EPA regulations and has no curiosity about it. They see the EPA not as a complex organization with multiple goals and many tools to help them achieve those goals, but as a part of something fundamentally wrong-headed.
Not in the US so I'm perhaps missing some context related to which bodies are responsible for which regulation but... why can't EPA regulation reduce wildfires?
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