Dive Brief:
- Following legal challenges to the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, federal regulators will delay by three years the time states have to comply with emissions restrictions, Breaking Energy reports.
- The rule, passed in 2011, was held up in the courts for three years but will require states to significantly improve air quality by reducing power plant emissions that contribute to pollution in other states.
- After an appeals court lifted a stay on the rule, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency moved to change the deadlines so that initial Phase 1 emissions budgets apply in 2015 and 2016 and that CSAPR’s Phase 2 emissions budgets and apply in 2017 and beyond.
Dive Insight:
The EPA's proposal would simply delay CSAPR requirements to reflect three years of legal challenges and delays following an appeals court's decision to lift the stay.
CSAPR requires 28 states to limit their state-wide emissions of sulfur dioxide and/or nitrogen oxides in order to reduce or eliminate the states’ contributions to fine particulate matter and/or ground-level ozone pollution in other states. Passed in 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a stay on the rule at the end of that year. In a subsequent motion the court vacated CSAPR based on a subset of petitioners’ claims, but in April of this year the U.S.Supreme Court reversed that decision and remanded the case to the D.C. Circuit.
The decision to "toll" emissions deadlines brings the rule's requirements in line with legal delays. EPA will take comment on the rule for 60 days. "The amendments are necessary to clarify the timing of requirements and elections under CSAPR ... so that compliance can begin in an orderly manner on January 1, 2015, consistent with the court’s order," EPA said.