Be Careful What You Ask For?

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Al Malefatto

Opposition from Republican and some Democratic senators, spurred on by industry groups, has successfully forestalled (if not killed, per our prior blog post) passage of comprehensive climate change legislation. However, as Greenberg Traurig shareholder David Mandelbaum notes in his monthly column for The Legal Intelligencer, EPA and some states (notably Pennsylvania) will be regulating greenhouse gas emissions, perhaps awkwardly, under the Clean Air Act and state analogs. Query whether we are better off driving nails with baseball bats or hammers?

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EPA - Your New Local Land Use Authority?

Posted on December 12, 2009 by Reed Rubinstein

The push to leverage GHG regulation into federal control over local land use, transportation, and development is accelerating.  The new House transportation bill, titled the Surface Transportation Authorization Act of 2009, authorizes the EPA to establish "national transportation related" GHG "goals," and requires States to "develop [approved] surface transportation-related greenhouse gas emission" limits.  In other words,  States must sync local land use with EPA's GHG limits.   

EPA, in turn, has been hard at work developing the analytic tools needed to extend federal control.  For example, in 2008 EPA circulated for "peer review" a draft report assessing  "land-use scenarios consistent with climate change emission story lines" to better "model" the impact of population growth and land use on "climate change," on the premise that "climate change interacts with existing and future land uses, such as residential housing and roads."  This report, though technically not "final" signals clearly where EPA intends to go. 

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