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Cars, Smog, and EPA

Legal Planet

This is part of an occasional series of posts about the evolution of pollution standards. Today’s subject is pollution control for new vehicles, which have been known to cause smog since the 1960s. The history of these pollution standards is quite distinctive. grams per mile (gpm) for NOx. compliance option.

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What’s Been Killing U.S. Coal?

Legal Planet

The passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act and its major 1990 Amendments don’t show up at all in a graph of coal use. Coal began to really plunge in 2012, three years before Obama’s Clean Power Plan was issued. Regulation may have made a difference, since coal requires more extensive pollution controls than competing fuels.

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EPA’s Power Plant Carbon Rules Are Critical—and Complex. Here’s What to Know, and What to Watch.

Union of Concerned Scientists

Multiple lines of analysis make clear that regardless of how cheap wind and solar power get, without directly addressing pollution from coal and gas plants, the country’s clean energy transition will not happen fast enough. One critical tool for forcing that reckoning comes from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

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The evolution of US NOx standards for cars

Environment, Law, and History

The reason may have been the high political stakes in the car industry or the relatively easier task of setting standards for new products in a single industry using a single energy process. The initial standard, set in the 1970 Clean Air Act, was 3.1 East River and Manhattan Skyline in Heavy Smog (Chester Higgins, Jr.,

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Happy 50th Anniversary, Federal Clean Water Act

Legal Planet

The political movement culminating in the passage of the Clean Water Act was triggered by several environmental disasters in the late 1960’s that shocked Americans and motivated them to take action to clean up the nation’s heavily-polluted waterways.

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The Good Neighbor Provision on Steroids: Third Circuit Ruling Resurrects Clean Air Act Section 126(b)

The Energy Law Blog

In the recent ruling, the Third Circuit held that it was reasonable for EPA to interpret Section 126(b) to be an “independent mechanism for enforcing interstate pollution control,” thereby giving EPA authority to directly regulate a specific source in an upwind state. See GenOn REMA, LLC v. 12-1022, slip op. at 29 (3d Cir. 7426(c)).

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Ask a Scientist: Top Takeaways from the New EPA Carbon Pollution Rules

Union of Concerned Scientists

EN: These standards—or at least something based on the same Clean Air Act provision—have been in the works for a long time. In 2015, the EPA issued the Clean Power Plan to reduce carbon pollution from power plants, which at the time were the largest source of heat-trapping emissions in the country.