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EPA chief is said to have ignored staff
Janet Wilson, Los Angeles Times
The head of the agency rejected written findings in ruling against a California emissions law, sources say.
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The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ignored his staff’s written findings in denying California’s request for a waiver to implement its landmark law to slash greenhouse gases from vehicles, sources inside and outside the agency told The Times on Thursday.
“California met every criteria . . . on the merits. The same criteria we have used for the last 40 years on all the other waivers,” said an EPA staffer. “We told him that. All the briefings we have given him laid out the facts.”
EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson announced Wednesday that because President Bush had signed an energy bill raising average fuel economy that there was no need or justification for separate state regulation. He also said that California’s request did not meet the legal standard set out in the Clean Air Act.
But his staff, which had worked for months on the waiver decision, concluded just the opposite, the sources said Thursday. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk with the media or because they feared reprisals.
(21 December 2007)
Also at Common Dreams. Also from the LA Times: Agency has home-court edge in next round:
Environmentalists voiced confidence Thursday that California’s bid to strictly limit greenhouse gases will survive a regulatory veto from the Bush administration, but the state’s legal challenge first will have to go through an appeals court that tilts in favor of the federal government and industry.
States vow to back Calif. against Bush
McClatchy-Tribune
From Oregon to Maine, a multistate groundswell emerged yesterday behind California’s struggle to enforce its greenhouse gas emissions law.
One day after the Bush administration blocked the law, governors and other officials from at least eight states pledged to help California as it prepares to sue the administration.
“We’re going to be out there on California’s side,” Oregon Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski said in an interview. “The only way we’re
(21 December 2007)
Arrogance and Warming
Editorial, New York Times
The Bush administration’s decision to deny California permission to regulate and reduce global warming emissions from cars and trucks is an indefensible act of executive arrogance that can only be explained as the product of ideological blindness and as a political payoff to the automobile industry.
(21 December 2007)
One Nation, One Energy Plan — but It’s the Wrong One
Warren Brown, Washington Post
…The new energy bill is a stinker in waiting — one that will do little to abate rapid increases in gasoline pump prices when they begin rising in earnest, probably after the 2008 elections.
Thus, it came as a surprise to me that anyone in the federal power structure — perhaps with the exception of Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett (R-Md.), a man who repeatedly has warned us about our refusal to take peak oil theories seriously and who voted against the bill for that and other reasons — had the temerity to stand up and do something gutsy about the matter.
But that is what EPA Administrator Johnson did. I had expected him to roll over and give up in the face of so much support for what I call the “California Above All” approach to fuel conservation and the reduction of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
But Johnson, much to my surprise and delight, just said “No.” Good for him, and here’s why:
We need one national policy affecting fuel conservation and tailpipe emissions. There are two simple reasons for this, both of which are painfully and expensively evident in the U.S. automobile industry. That same expense and pain, much of it unwittingly borne by consumers, exists in the global automobile business, where competing fuel-conservation and emission-control rules collide.
(23 December 2007)
Warren Brown is one of the few journalists writing in the Washington Post, LA Times or NY Times who is openly sympathetic to the idea of peak oil. -BA
