Clean Air Act of 1977

Clean Air Act of 1977

The 1977 Clean Air Act amendments addressed many plants originally grandfathered under the 1970 CAA by instituting New Source Review (NSR).  Any significant modifications resulting in additional emissions to existing plants would now trigger an NSR and bring the plant under CAA regulation.  Plant owners would either have to install pollution abatement equipment or abate at another facility under their ownership.  Additionally, the 1977 amendments instituted Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) rules.  Three classifications were created under the PSD rules.  Class I: very little additional pollution is allowed; Class II: moderate pollution is allowed; Class III: pollution approaching but not bypassing NAAQS is allowed.  Federal lands and national parks were automatically designated Class 1 regions.

Commentary

Republicans Can't Name A Single "Job Killer" Regulation

January 25, 2011

By James Lardner. ReMapping Debate. January 25, 2011.

"Job-killing regulations? Opponents fail to support claims with evidence" investigates the right-wing’s persistent use of “job killer” rhetoric to describe anything they don’t like. Environmental legislation is often the target, and the examples used here are entirely from that subject area.  Lardner has done a lot of original reporting, including an interview with Eban Goodstein, an economist well-versed in these subjects. Goodstein says “The dollar costs of environmental regulation…have typically been too small — no more than about 2 percent of overall production costs — to cause a company to consider relocating to a foreign country.” These anti-regulatory attacks never consider the job-producing effects of regulation either. Although the author interviews many anti-regulation Republicans, not a single one can name an instance of a previous environmental regulation or law that killed jobs.

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Clean Air Act

Protecting the Clean Air Act: Getting the Jobs and Investment Story Right

September 13, 2010

Laurie Johnson. Natural Resources Defense Council. September 13, 2010.

With stalled clean energy legislation in DC, opponents of environmental protection have shifted their focus away from pro-active legislation toward dismantling existing environmental protection laws. Against the Supreme Court’s mandate, industry-funded politicians and the lobbyists that support them (e.g. National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)) are trying to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from doing its job: requiring polluters to reduce global warming pollution. Predictably, they are making the same argument they’ve always made—one that’s never come true: “Protecting the environment will destroy jobs; it will be impossible for firms to meet any new requirements and stay in business at the same time."

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Clean Fuel

The Historical Record of Job Growth and Environmental Protection: A Convenient Truth for Climate Legislation

June 18, 2009

Laurie Johnson. Posted on the Natural Resources Defense Council's Switchboard blog. June 18, 2009. 

Over three decades of experience with environmental regulation show that investments in environmental protection, coupled with GDP growth, led to an increase in jobs that were orders of magnitude larger than any job losses caused by environmental requirements. The dire job loss predictions by industry simply never came to pass. Instead, tens of thousands of new jobs were created every year, much more than the job reductions per year that various government agencies and academic analyses found after the fact, in only a few sectors.[1] We detail the data further below.

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smokestack and dirty air

Crying Wolf Again: Big Business Gearing up for a Fight Against Obama’s Environmental Program

May 11, 2009

By Peter Dreier and Donald Cohen. Posted on Huffington Post. May 11, 2009.

In its first 100 days, the Obama administration did more to address global warming and the environmental crisis than the Bush administration did in eight years.

Obama knows, though, that the big environmental battles are still to come. In a interview last month, Lisa Jackson, Obama's EPA administrator, anticipated how opponents would attack the president's environmental reforms. "If you look at the history of environmental laws in this country, " she explained, "every time ... the lobbyists say, 'Oh, this will shut down the American economy. Every last one of you will lose jobs.' It's always these overblown, doomsday scenarios that overlook ... the fact that you can indeed build an economy towards green energy."

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Cry Wolf Quotes

Additional money spent on secondary cleanup standards is not going to make that much difference in air quality, but it will hurt the American steel industry….In short, if it did not have to meet environmental requirements, the steel industry would have the capital to increase its annual shipments from 92 million tons in 1981 to 105 million tons in 1990….The need to meet future environmental requirements will reduce this expansion to 96 million tons.

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The American Steel Institute, Washington Dateline.
07/27/1981 | Full Details | Law(s): Clean Air Act of 1977

At its worst, the Clean Air Act speaks of the potential wholesale shutdown of industrial facilities should a state not be able to attain the standards by set dates -- 1982 and 1987. At its best, the act will require the imposition of new and expensive technology and will severely limit the location of new industry in major metropolitan areas.

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Angelo Sirancusa, representing coalition of major industry. The Washington Post.
01/15/1977 | Full Details | Law(s): Clean Air Act of 1977

We believe the way in which the law is currently administered conflicts with other important national goals -- the need to increase productivity levels, to create new jobs and to spur development of domestic energy sources.

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James Evans, Chairman of the Union Pacific Company, on behalf of U.S. Business Roundtable, Washington News.
11/22/1980 | Full Details | Law(s): Clean Air Act of 1977

Obviously, the Clean Air Act needs to be changed. The construction ban has no place in this country. It is an inherently unfair punishment of communities and does not clean the air.

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Dr. Harvey Alter, manager of the Chamber of Commerce’s resources and environmental quality department.
07/15/1982 | Full Details | Law(s): Clean Air Act of 1977
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Evidence

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