04.29.09
Too big to fail
Published on Wednesday, April 29, 2009 by The Nation
Planet Earth: Too Big to Fail
by Philip Radford
The Obama administration has given itself an extraordinarily powerful tool that could help the president achieve all three of his top domestic goals at once–but only if he has the political moxie to deploy it to its full extent.
That tool is the proposed Endangerment Finding–a formal declaration by the Environmental Protection Agency that global warming indeed threatens human health and welfare. Once the administration issues the final declaration, the Clean Air Act is triggered, giving the administration sweeping authority to decide how to reduce global warming pollution from power plants, vehicles, and other sources, how much, and how fast. According to a groundbreaking new analysis from New York University, the administration could even unilaterally establish a cap-and-trade system very similar to what Congress is considering.