Suchergebnisse

This report discusses seven law suits that the Justice Department filed against electric utilities in the Midwest and South in violation of the New Source Review (NSR) and Clean Air Act (CAA). The EPA is attempting to use the NSR and CAA to reduce emissions, even thought they believe that some sources are evading NSR requirements.

Identifies problems with the Clean Air Act's New Source Review: It is part and parcel of the larger miscue of grandfathering, and it is defined mostly in terms of the installation of pollution-control equipment. These aspects inhibit the turnover of polluting capital, deemed problematic from an economic and environmental perspective.

While processes of policy change have received great scholarly attention, policy dismantling as a specific type of change has not yet been thoroughly studied. This might be due to low empirical visibility. Although policy dismantling has been rare in environmental policy, it is getting more relevant as environmental legislation tightens and places increasing burdens on polluting industries. This got obvious in the United States during the Bush Presidency where several attempts to dismantle environmental programs occurred. In order to improve our understanding about the circumstances under which environmental policies get dismantled, we analyze the case of the New Source Review (NSR). The NSR requires industries to install modern pollution control technologies in stationary sources of air pollution like coal fired power plants and refineries. NSR regulatory provisions require these sources to install pollution control when they expand capacities and increase emission levels. Between 2001 and 2007 several attempts to weaken the regulatory stringency of this program occurred. The Bush Administration proposed both legislative and as rule changes which dismantled the regulatory stringency of the Clean Air Act. The analysis of actors' motivations to dismantle environmental regulations as well as institutional constraints limiting and/or impeding dismantling will improve our theoretical and empirical understanding of dismantling processes. By looking at NSR dismantling pressures and processes we examine under which conditions political actors engage in the dismantling of environmental policies and what factors influence the success of dismantling attempts.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) revisions to the New Source Review (NSR) program--a key component of the federal government's plan to limit harmful industrial emissions--have been under scrutiny by the Congress, environmental groups, state and local air quality agencies, the courts, and several industry groups. The revisions more explicitly define when companies can modify their facilities without needing to obtain an NSR permit or install costly pollution controls, as NSR requires. GAO was asked to determine (1) whether EPA and the Department of Justice (DOJ) assessed the potential impact of the revisions on the ongoing enforcement cases against coal-fired utilities and, if so, what the assessments indicated; and (2) what effect, if any, the revisions might have on public access to information about facility changes and their resulting emissions."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "A recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) final rule changing the Clean Air Act's New Source Review (NSR) program--a key means to protect public health and enhance air quality--has been under scrutiny by the Congress, industry, environmental groups, state and local air quality agencies, and the courts. GAO was asked to determine the basis of EPA's conclusions that (1) the rule's economic impacts would not be significant enough to merit a detailed analysis and (2) the NSR program, prior to the rule, discouraged some energy efficiency projects. GAO, among other things, reviewed EPA's analysis of the rule and its impacts, as well as guidance from EPA and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on analyzing such impacts. GAO also met with industry and environmental stakeholders."