State Attorney General Sam Olens is joining a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s demand that Georgia and other states change previously approved rules regarding emissions from industrial sources during startup, shutdown, and malfunction periods.
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“For decades Kentucky has self-regulated air quality standards during startup, shutdown and the malfunction of power plants and manufacturers in our state”, said Attorney General Conway.
The brand new laws have been issued final week by the federal company as a part of the Clear Air Act, underneath a piece of the regulation that’s seldom used. “In yet another “sue and settle” case, the EPA is rushing to appease the interests of the Sierra Club and force 35 States to alter their SIPs even though the plans are already succeeding”.
The Clean Air Act establishes a cooperative-federalism approach to regulating the nation’s air quality and dictates that EPA has the primary responsibility to identify air pollutants that pose a threat to public health and to set national air quality standards; however, the Act gives states the primary responsibility to determine how to achieve those standards.
“But it is absolutely scandalous that EPA disregarded the objections of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which expressed strong concerns that the rule was arbitrarily written, is legally indefensible and would be extremely hard to implement”, he added. “If the EPA’s action is not set aside, Kansans will again be forced to pay the cost of another unneeded rule”.
Today, Attorney General Bondi filed the petition for review in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit asking the Court to review the EPA’s final rule.
The mandate to 36 states came after environmental groups complained that the Clean Air Act does not allow such exemptions, and called them “loopholes”.
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Rutledge’s office joins other Republican attorneys general from Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and West Virginia in the challenge.
