Trevor Schakohl
The Daily Caller
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. 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.”…
“[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.
