http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/opinion/a-flimsy-legal-attack-on-clean-air.html 2016-09-30 09:46:21 A Flimsy Legal Attack on Clean Air Power industry groups and 28 states are challenging a plan that is a key part of President Obama’s response to climate change. === In eight years, But one very important part of his strategy remains in legal limbo — the Clean Power Plan, a rule created by the The rule orders states to make big cuts in carbon dioxide emissions from power plants over the next 15 years, setting individual goals for each state while giving them considerable flexibility in how to get reach them. This framework is wholly consistent with the federal-state partnerships that for years have governed the nation’s environmental statutes. On Tuesday There is no question that the Clean Air Act allows the federal government to regulate carbon dioxide emissions; the Supreme Court has said it does. And there’s no question that the government can regulate these emissions from power plants; the Supreme Court has said so. The issue is whether the E.P.A. can use an approach to regulating greenhouse gases, different from the way it has regulated other types of pollutants, like mercury emissions. Traditionally, in reducing those pollutants, the agency has required power plants to make technological improvements. But no economically feasible technology is yet available to control carbon dioxide emissions at the plant level. The agency has therefore told the states that to meet their targets they must move “outside the fenceline” of existing power plants by, say, switching to cleaner fuels, investing in alternative forms of energy like wind and The opponents also offer other objections, including a long-forgotten legislative glitch that occurred when Congress amended the Clean Air Act in 1990. The House version of the legislation said the agency could not regulate a new pollutant under one section of the law (the one it is relying on now) if it were already regulating other pollutants under another section. The Senate, in effect, said that such overlapping regulation was fine. The argument that this clerical discrepancy should keep the agency from regulating carbon dioxide is preposterous. Of the court’s 10 judges, six are Democratic appointees, which gives the rule a good chance of surviving, as it should. Despite apocalyptic warnings from some of the opponents that the rule would destroy America’s energy system, it would in fact move that system in the same direction that the marketplace and modern technology are already driving it — toward cleaner energy alternatives, and away from the oldest and dirtiest fossil fuels.