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Since the early days of the Obama administration, conservative
politicians have railed against the President's "war on coal." As
evidence of this supposed siege, they point to a series of rules
issued by the Environmental Protection Agency that require the
nation's power plants to cut their emissions of several types of
air pollution. It's true that, because coal produces far more
pollution than any other major energy source, the EPA's rules are
expected to further reduce the fuel's already shrinking share of
the electricity market, in favor of cleaner options like natural
gas, wind and solar power. Even so, the rules are hardly the
"unprecedented regulatory assault" that opponents make them out to
be. Instead, they are merely the latest chapter in a longstanding
quest for redemption, a multi-decade struggle to overcome a tragic
flaw in our nation's most important environmental law. In 1970, a
nearly unanimous Congress passed the Clean Air Act, which had the
remarkably ambitious aim of eliminating all air pollution that
posed a threat to public health or welfare. But there was a
problem: for some of the most common pollutants, Congress empowered
the EPA to set emission limits only for newly constructed
industrial facilities-most notably, power plants. Existing
facilities, by contrast, would be largely exempt from direct
federal regulation-a regulatory practice known as "grandfathering."
What lawmakers didn't anticipate was that imposing costly
requirements on new plants while giving existing ones a pass would
simply encourage those old plants to stay in business much longer
than originally planned. For almost half a century now, the core
problems of U.S. environmental policy have flowed inexorably from
the smokestacks of these coal-fired clunkers, which continue to
pollute at far higher rates than their younger peers. In Struggling
for Air, Richard L. Revesz and Jack Lienke chronicle the political
compromises that gave rise to grandfathering, its deadly
consequences, and the repeated attempts-by Presidential
administrations of both parties-to make things right.
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