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Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the ‘War on Coal ’, by Revesz Richard L. & Lienke Jack. Oxford University Press, 2016, 221 pp, £22.99, ISBN 9780190233112
Despite almost half a century of regulation, progress in reducing the emissions from certain segments of the United States (US) energy sector remains stymied by elderly grandfathers refusing to ‘shuffle off this mortal coil’. 1 Almost 50 years ago, the US enacted the modern version of the Clean Air Act (CAA). 2 Responding to an increase in public interest on the topic of air pollution, the US Congress passed an ambitious bill that aimed to decouple economic growth from environmental harm and ensure clean, healthy air for all Americans. The CAA empowered the newly created US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set emissions standards and regulate sources of emissions, including power plants. However, the delegated regulatory authority for many common pollutants under the New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) 3 extends only to newly constructed or modified facilities. 4 Existing facilities are generally exempted from most new federal regulations through a concept known as ‘grandfathering’. Taking advantage of this grandfathering provision and the regulatory arbitrage opportunity it created, many coal-fired power plants in parts of the US extended their operational lives far beyond their original projected retirement dates, undermining a key assumption that Congress relied on when including the grandfathering provision in the NSPS. To address this issue, the administration of President Barack Obama promulgated three regulations imposing restrictions on grandfathered coal-fired power plants – regulations that critics allege amount to a ‘war on coal’.
In Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the ‘War on Coal’, Richard L. Revesz and Jack Lienke argue that far from conducting a novel ‘war on coal’, the regulatory actions implemented by the Obama administration were the logical, incremental, and necessary continuation of a multi-decade effort by presidential administrations of both major US political parties to address the issues caused by grandfathered power plants. To develop and support this argument, the authors present a detailed and insightful account of the forces that resulted in the enactment of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970 5 and the efforts of subsequent presidential administrations and Congress to address the emissions of air pollutants from...