This piece originally appeared in The Hill.
The Clean Air Act, first enacted in 1963, is in many ways a wild success. Thanks to the landmark environmental law and its subsequent amendments, the six most common air pollutants fell by an average of 69 percent between 1980 and 2019. Acid rain, once a major public health threat in the U.S., has been reduced to a fraction of the problem it once was. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that these efforts now save more than 200,000 lives each year.
But the law, which has not been significantly amended since 1990, is not without some glaring defects — for the economy and environment alike. Ironically, the regulatory hurdles the Clean Air Act originally created for heavy polluters have now begun to hinder the very sorts of investments needed for clean technology and environmental progress. If the U.S. wants to revitalize its domestic industries while continuing to protect the environment, Congress must fix these inefficiencies and bring the Clean Air Act into the 21st century. A new bill from Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) offers a chance to do just that.
The Modernizing Clean Air Permitting Act would change the way that the law defines what’s known as a “source modification” — that is, any change made by a facility that might increase its emissions. Under the current version of the Clean Air Act, if a modification increases hourly emissions — regardless of its overall long-term emissions impact — it can trigger a lengthy permitting process known as New Source Review. This approach has created an enormously skewed incentive structure, in which it is often cheaper for facilities to operate more expensive, higher-polluting equipment than to replace them with newer, cleaner technology. By the EPA’s own admission, “NSR as applied… discourages projects that would have provided needed capacity or efficiency improvements and would not have increased air pollution — in fact in some cases air pollution may have decreased.”
Continue reading in The Hill.
