20 States Defend the EPA!

A coalition of 20 states (including Massachusetts) and 13 environmental groups have pledged their support for the EPA, saying that despite "extravagant claims of harm" from industry, the new greenhouse gas regulations would hardly hurt them.

Those states, led by New York, are lined up against 17 states that are challenging the agency's plan to begin regulating greenhouse gases from large power plants, factories and other major emissions sources.

The brief states - 

"The stay motions should be denied in all respects. Despite hundreds of pages of briefing, thousands of pages of exhibits, scattershot assertions of illegality, and extravagant claims of harm, the stay motions are, in the end, insubstantial. "

"Movants' central claims on the merits are foreclosed by the Clean Air Act's text and by judicial precedent, ... their allegations of irreparable harm are vague, often unconnected to the actual decisions under review, and unsubstantiated; and Movants simply ignore significant harms that a stay would cause other parties and the public interest."

"Even a one-year stay would result in the release of many millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions that would otherwise have been avoided under the rules," the brief says. "Furthermore, the damage from these emissions would persist for well over a century, given the long atmospheric lifetime of greenhouse gas pollutants, contributing to climate change for many years."