Jenner & Block: U.S. EPA Issues Proposed Rule - Stationary Sources of GHG Emissions Will Comply with "Tailored" Clean Air Act Permit Requirements
“On September 30, 2009, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a proposed rule that will, if finalized, prescribe how the Clean Air Act (CAA) permitting requirements are applied to stationary sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions,” the authors report. “EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced the proposed rule, ‘Prevention of Significant Deterioration and Title V Greenhouse Gas Tailoring Rule (Proposed Tailoring Rule'),’ in a speech to the Second Annual Governors' Global Climate Summit.”
The authors explain that “The proposed rule is called a ‘tailoring rule’ because it ‘tailors’ the application of the CAA's permitting requirements so that only larger sources of GHG emissions are impacted. Notably, this rule, for the first time, explains how the CAA permitting requirements will be applied to GHG emissions from stationary sources, after much debate about whether the CAA does, could, or should apply to those emissions.”
“The main effect of the Proposed Tailoring Rule is to create new ‘threshold’ and ‘significance’ levels for the six primary GHGs,” note the authors, who then set forth the four ‘streamlining’ techniques that the EPA believes will allow for more efficient and less costly regulation of GHG emissions.
The article concludes with an analysis of the impact of the proposed tailoring rule and a list of five practice pointers for practitioners.
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