Jackson Cagey On Efforts To Block EPA Regulation

By Amy Harder  

NJ: In his plan (subscription) to delay EPA's regulation of greenhouse gases, Senator Rockefeller is careful not to include vehicle emissions regulations and also to make sure it isn't an indefinite or complete ban on the agency's regulatory power. Is there any situation under which you would support an effort like that?

Jackson: I can't talk about supporting any effort other than moving our country forward on a clean energy agenda. I haven't seen any legislation yet from Senator Rockefeller. Certainly, one of our jobs at EPA is to provide assistance and response to legislation and we would do that if there was something to see.

NJ: In a letter to Rockefeller and other Senate Democrats earlier this week, you said EPA will not regulate stationary sources this year. Would there be any detrimental effect to putting off the regulations of stationary sources for two more years?

Jackson: I don't want to speculate until I see what he [Rockefeller] has. I certainly understand his concern, which is that he believes this should be addressed, but it should be addressed by the U.S. Congress. I agree. I would like to see the Senate working on comprehensive energy legislation.

NJ: Did concerns from Rockefeller and other lawmakers factor into your decision to delay the rule and also increase the permitting threshold to sources emitting "something substantially higher" than 25,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions?

Jackson: The biggest thing that had an impact on what we wrote in the letter was public comments. The letter came in and what I thought we had to do was respond quickly. When you have U.S. senators, who we all know we're trying to talk to about the need of energy legislation, asking those kinds of fundamental questions, I wanted to get an answer -- as much of an answer as we could get back. But really, as the letter states, what happen is we get all these comments -- almost half a million -- and in the course of responding to them we've had to start thinking about making judgments and that's what the letter reflects.

NJ: Could you envision delaying the regulations longer than what you noted in the letter?

Jackson: The letter is my best judgment right now. I didn't want to go any further than the letter because we're still working awful hard. But I think what the letter talks about is very general terms, the fact that this year's off the table, and we're talking about a very gradual phase-in beginning next year.

NJ: With action in Congress stalled, more attention has been given to regional cap-and-trade efforts. How do you think the recent pull-out of Arizona from one such compact affects EPA's national regulations? Does it provide more evidence that EPA must act to give industries certainty?

Jackson: The lack of regulatory certainty is from a bunch of different reasons. There are political reasons why states come and go into compacts, and they do come and they do go, it's not just that folks are leaving. And there are reasons why certain businesses come and go as well. But the uncertainty is there. EPA has dozens of lawsuits on its docket of people challenging various permitting actions that businesses want to have on the basis of uncertainties around greenhouse gas regulation.

And that's not going to go away regardless of whether EPA is in or out of the picture because a lot of those actions are based on state actions. Down in North Carolina, we have lawsuits based on tort law and common law, saying that greenhouse gases are a nuisance. This is broader than the Clean Air Act, broader than the EPA, and underscores the need for legislation to try to move past this issue. What business always asks me for is regulatory certainty, and Congress could help with that.

NJ: In your letter to Democrats, you left open the option to target emissions of smaller sources, something some people say is a switch from what the agency said last fall. Can you elaborate on that?

Jackson: I think you have to look at the language of the tailoring rule. It says we're going to tailor the Clean Air Act requirements to phase them in. And we took comments on that, but it never completely envisioned that Clean Air Act requirements would go away completely for all sources. Now there is still a lot of discussion to be had about the schedule under which you tailor. What I said is that the smaller sources we wouldn't even begin to look at until 2016. That's a little bit of a long way off. It is my absolute hope that we're not talking about a non-carbon-constrained future in the year 2016.