The Bush Administration, the EPA, and Mercury

In response to Rick's most recent post in our to-and-fro, I decided to consult my colleague Bill Buzbee, who is an expert in administrative law and environmental law.  Here is what Bill told me:

The Clean Air Act has a savings clause and has long been construed to allow states to be more protective of their citizens.  It also has some explicitly preemptive provisions preventing states from adopting different standards for auto emissions, unless the alternative approach matches an approved different approach for California.  Thus, absent a direct “conflict” justifying an assertion of preemption, the Clean Air Act gives EPA little if any statutory authorization for imposing a “ceiling” on states, precluding more protective actions.  Iif the NYT’s article is accurate about EPA’s pressure, it is consistent w/a wide array of agency actions over the past couple of years seeking to preclude more protective state law, be it in statutes, regulations, or through common law.  If you want to see my discussion of CAA use of floors, not ceilings, and other description and analysis of these recent broad claims of preemptive power by an array of agencies, you might look at my new article “Asymmetrical Regulation: Risk, Preemption, and the Floor/Ceiling Distinction,” 82 NYU L Rev. 1547 (2007).  Historically, federal assertions of “ceiling” preemption have been rare in the risk regulation setting.

To download/read the article to which Bill refers, Bill's own article, click here.

Here is the abstract to the article:

       

New York University Law Review, Vol. 82, 2007                   Emory Public Law Research Paper No. 07-23                   Emory Law and Economics Research Paper No. 07-20

Abstract:     If the federal government has constitutional power to address a social ill, and hence has power under the Supremacy Clause to preempt state, local, and common law regimes, is there a principled rationale for distinguishing federal standards that set a federal floor or ceiling? At first blush, the two appear to be mere flip sides of the same federal power: The choice of a floor reflects a goal of minimizing risk, while ceilings reflect concern with excessively stringent regulation. This Article argues, however, that these two regulatory choices are fundamentally different in their institutional implications. Floors embrace additional and more stringent state and common law action, while ceilings are better labeled a "unitary federal choice" due to how they preclude any other regulatory choice by state regulators and also eliminate the possibility of the different actors, incentives, and modalities of information elicitation and proof that common law settings provide. Advocates of free markets respond that this is precisely the idea - regulatory certainty is enhanced with a unitary federal choice, allowing manufacturers to plan with confident knowledge of the regulatory terrain, unbuffeted by an array of uncoordinated actors. Debate over floors versus ceilings was, until recently, largely hypothetical, due to the rarity of federal imposition of ceilings. During the past year, however, in settings ranging from product approvals to regulation of risks posed by chemical plants to possible climate change legislation regarding greenhouse gases, legislators and regulators have embraced the broad, preemptive impact of unitary federal choice preemption. The federal action regarding such risks would be the final regulatory choice. But under what theory of regulation and legislation can one be confident that placing all decisionmaking power in one institution at one time will lead to appropriate standard setting? In fact, advocates of risk regulation, "experimentalist regulation" scholars, and skeptics about the likelihood of public-regarding regulation all call for attention to pervasive risks of regulatory failure. Agency and legislative inertia, information uncertainties and asymmetries, outdated information and actions, regulatory capture, and a host of other common regulatory risks create a substantial chance of poor or outdated regulatory choice. Considering these pervasive risks of regulatory failure, the principled distinctions between floor and ceiling preemption become apparent. Vesting all decisionmaking power in one institution can freeze regulatory developments. Unitary federal choice preemption is an institutional arrangement that threatens to produce poorly tailored regulation and public choice distortions of the political process, whether it is before the legislature or a federal agency. Floor preemption, in contrast, constitutes a partial displacement of state choice in setting a minimum level of protection, but leaves room for other actors and additional regulatory action. Floors anticipate and benefit from the institutional diversity they permit. This Article closes by showing how the institutional diversity engendered by retaining multiple layers of law and regulatory actors creates conditions conducive to reassessment and adjustment of rigid or outdated regulation.