EPA should use Clean Air Act to address climate change

As we approach the 40th anniversary of the Clean Air Act, it is
appropriate for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to use this
law for the agency’s most important and challenging task yet: solving
climate change. Decades of success using the act to make America’s
communities cleaner and safer can serve as a model of how to tackle
climate change.

 Public Citizen supports the development of strong, science-based
regulations to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power
plants, oil refineries and other “smokestack” emitters responsible
for 70 percent of our nation’s emissions of pollutants that cause
climate change. The EPA has emerged as the only arm of the federal
government with the credibility to solve climate change, as Congress
thus far has produced deeply flawed legislation that provides billions
of dollars in financial giveaways to polluters while failing to fix our
corporate-controlled energy system, which contributes to
unsustainability and pollution.

 Most unsettling is the fact that climate legislation passed by the
House of Representatives would end the ability of the EPA to regulate
greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Public Citizen
understands why polluters’ lobbyists have tried to eviscerate the
EPA’s authority: Because they know that the agency now is largely
shielded from the influence of corporate special interests and can
therefore concentrate on formulating the regulatory solutions to climate
change based on science, not politics.

 As world leaders prepare to meet in Copenhagen next month to discuss
how nations can work together to solve climate change, the eyes of the
world will look not to Congress, but to the EPA for leadership. Public
Citizen strongly supports the agency’s efforts to use the full extent
of the Clean Air Act to implement science-based regulations to sharply
reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing
industrial sources.