Mobile
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
News EPA: Co2 = bad gas
Posted By Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman on Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 4:08 PM
In a huge step for mankind ...
Carbon dioxide will soon be declared a dangerous pollutant - a move that could help propel slow-moving climate-change legislation on Capitol Hill, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Monday.EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told reporters that a formal "endangerment finding," which would trigger federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, probably would "happen in the next months."
Jackson announced her timeline even as top senators said they were delaying plans to introduce legislation that would set new limits on carbon dioxide emissions. Senators had been scheduled to unveil legislation next Tuesday, but the date has now been pushed back to later in September.
The EPA can formalize the finding anytime, now that it has closed a 60-day public comment period that netted more than 300,000 responses.
A formal endangerment finding would obligate the agency to regulate greenhouse gas pollution under the Clean Air Act - even if Congress doesn't pass a final climate-change bill.
President Obama and Jackson have said they would prefer that Congress - rather than the EPA - take the lead in implementing new greenhouse gas limits. Businesses and energy industry leaders also have largely favored congressional action over EPA-imposed limits, because they believe lawmakers are better positioned to combine economic safeguards with any new carbon cap.
"Legislation is so important, because it will combine the most efficient, most economy-wide, least costly (and) least disruptive way to deal with carbon dioxide pollution," Jackson said. "We get further faster without top-down regulation."
But Jackson insisted the EPA would continue on a path that began when the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases qualified as pollutants and could be regulated if the government determined they threatened the public.
"Two years is a long time for this country to wait for us to respond to the Supreme Court's ruling," Jackson said.
Read the entire The SanFrancisco Chronicle article here.
Purdue University on where Co2 is coming from:
Speaking of...
Latest in The CLog
More by Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman
-
Cancer's better with a side of 'shrooms
Aug 7, 2020 -
The Last Mountain will move viewers
Aug 4, 2011 -
Government's mixed message for women
Aug 2, 2011 - More »
-
Meghan McCain's dating woes revealed
The girl is hard up and in need of help. Volunteers?
-
5 Reasons To Buy Home Insurance Policy
-
Question the Queen City: What lurks in the woods of Camp Greene? 1
The World War 1 training facility's tragic past lingers even today
