EPA Should Use Clean Air Act to Address Climate Change

*Note:
Tyson Slocum delivered this statement today at a public hearing held by
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on regulating greenhouse gas
emissions from new and existing industrial facilities under the Clean
Air Act.

As
we approach the 40th anniversary of the Clean Air Act, it is
appropriate for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to use this
law for the agency's most important and challenging task yet: solving
climate change. Decades of success using the act to make America's
communities cleaner and safer can serve as a model of how to tackle
climate change.

Public
Citizen supports the development of strong, science-based regulations
to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, oil
refineries and other "smokestack" emitters responsible for 70 percent
of our nation's emissions of pollutants that cause climate change. The
EPA has emerged as the only arm of the federal government with the
credibility to solve climate change, as Congress thus far has produced
deeply flawed legislation that provides billions of dollars in
financial giveaways to polluters while failing to fix our
corporate-controlled energy system, which contributes to
unsustainability and pollution.

Most
unsettling is the fact that climate legislation passed by the House of
Representatives would end the ability of the EPA to regulate greenhouse
gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Public Citizen understands why
polluters' lobbyists have tried to eviscerate the EPA's authority:
Because they know that the agency now is largely shielded from the
influence of corporate special interests and can therefore concentrate
on formulating the regulatory solutions to climate change based on
science, not politics.

As
world leaders prepare to meet in Copenhagen next month to discuss how
nations can work together to solve climate change, the eyes of the
world will look not to Congress, but to the EPA for leadership. Public
Citizen strongly supports the agency's efforts to use the full extent
of the Clean Air Act to implement science-based regulations to sharply
reduce America's greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing
industrial sources.