FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, May 21, 2009
Contact: Phil Kerpen or James Valvo (202) 349-5880

WASHINGTON—The grassroots free market organization Americans for Prosperity today committed to expose the dangerous economy-wide consequences of greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act, which the EPA today announced is their intended means of pursuing the Obama Administration’s new proposed fuel economy standards.

“The EPA has stated that it intends to regulate auto emissions by shoehorning greenhouse gas regulation into §202 (a) of the 1970 Clean Air Act,” said Americans for Prosperity Director of Policy Phil Kerpen. “By pursuing these regulations and the pending endangerment finding, the Obama Administration and the EPA are setting up a regulatory disaster that will shut down the whole U.S. economy as bureaucrats, lawyers, and judges force every Clean Air Act program to include greenhouse gases.”

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), an author of the original 1970 Clean Air Act, has said that the bill was never designed for greenhouse gases and that a “glorious mess” of lawsuits would result from its distortion.

“Morphing the Clean Air Act into a global warming statute is the economic equivalent of holding a loaded gun to the head of the U.S. economy,” Kerpen said. “It will only take one extremist’s environmental lawsuit to pull the trigger. The resulting regulatory cascade will shut down construction in this country and subject everything from lawnmowers, to farms with 25 or more cows, to restaurants that use natural gas as a cooking fuel to federal regulatory requirements. EPA has 18,000 pages of appendices explaining everything they would do.

“This is a genuine nightmare, and these fuel economy standards are setting it all in motion. If Congress and the White House allow this to happen, they should be held responsible. We are committed to educating and mobilizing the American public to stop this,” Kerpen said.