Word: epa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ruling allows the EPA to begin regulating greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, factories and major industrial polluters, although the precise details of that regulation have yet to be worked out. "The threat is real," said Jackson. "If we don't act to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the planet we will leave to the future will be very different than the one we know today." (See TIME's special report on the environment...
...major U.N. summit on climate change opened Monday in Copenhagen, but the big environmental news was made across the Atlantic in Washington. In an afternoon press conference, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that the agency had finalized its finding that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health and welfare...
Jackson's announcement was the final step in a response that has been nearly three years in the making - since April 2007, when the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the Clean Air Act gives the EPA the authority to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases, if they are indeed a threat to human health and welfare. At the time, the court directed the agency to review the latest science on climate change in order to make a determination...
Under former President George W. Bush, the EPA largely punted on the question, even burying analysis from its own scientists in the waning months of that Administration. When President Barack Obama took office, he directed the new EPA to kick-start the regulation process - nearly 11 months and 380,000 public comments later, the agency is now poised to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. "This cements 2009's place in history as the year the U.S. government began seriously addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution," said Jackson...
Although the announcement had been in the pipeline for a while, the timing was appropriate, with Copenhagen getting under way. The EPA ruling is a signal to other countries that the U.S. is prepared to contribute to a climate treaty, and it is a useful tool for Obama, who will participate in the Copenhagen summit on Dec. 18, its final day. "In light of the EPA endangerment finding, the President's appearance in Copenhagen will carry even more weight, because it shows that America is taking this issue very seriously and is moving forward," said Senator Barbara Boxer, head...