Federal Court Overturns EPA Emission Standards

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s rule that treated boilers built as early as 2010 as new misinterprets what Congress outlined in the Clean Air Act, a federal appeals court ruled on Sept. 3. The EPA’s 2022 rule said boilers were new as long as they were built after June 4, 2010. Congress wrote in the Clean Air Act that a new source for emissions is constructed or reconstructed after the EPA’s administrator first proposes emissions standards for that source. While government lawyers argued that the standards were first proposed in 2010, followed by a lengthy process of refinement, the law refers to the date of the first proposal of each iteration of the standards, which, in this case, would be 2020, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit....