A Dozen States Sue EPA Over Emissions
A Supreme Court ruling didn’t make it happen; we’ll see if a lawsuit can compel the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. A dozen states, the city of New York and the District of Columbia, led by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, are suing the EPA in order to challenge its refusal to regulate greenhouse gases from oil refineries. The states include New York, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.
Last year the Supreme Court decided that, according to the Clean Air Act, the EPA should regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants. But the EPA has passed the buck and claimed that the duty falls to Congress. In response to the lawsuit announced today, EPA spokesman Tim Lyons told Reuters that the time and money would be better spent lobbying Congress to legislate regulations than introducing lawsuits.
Bush doesn’t seem like the lame duck environmentalist type who would given in to a lawsuit from a state Attorney General. Greenhouse regulation is coming, but it will likely have to wait for the next administration, which undoubtedly will be kinder to the cleantech sector. Cuomo is really raining on the Bush administration’s environmental parade today; it just got around to saving the whales.
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