This blog leads the league in posts about EPA’s Regional Haze power grab. In a nutshell, the Agency is usurping the States’ rightful authority to set visibility improvement policy pursuant to a Clean Air Act provision known as Regional Haze.
EPA’s actions are out-of-bounds for two reasons: (1) The legal and regulatory history of the Regional Haze rule unequivocally demonstrates that the States—and not federal regulators—are the lead decision-makers; and (2) EPA’s preferred controls cost billions more than the States’ controls, in order to achieve a visibility “improvement” that is invisible to the naked eye.
To date, EPA’s has imposed nearly $400 million annually in unjustified costs on New Mexico, Oklahoma, and North Dakota. The Agency has proposed to impose almost $120 million per year in costs beyond what Wyoming and Nebraska officials had deemed to be appropriate. Arkansas, Utah, Arizona and Minnesota are next.
Consistent with his Imperial Presidency, Obama will direct the EPA to stay the course.
The basis for the entire regional haze program is a wish and a promise. The original development of the technical background was riddled with poorly thought out assumptions, imaginary mathematics and foolish errors(for example taking a simple arithmetic average of calculated quantities such as relative humidity). There is no reason to believe any of it.