Republican senators are wading into a long-running fight over a key EPA policy to limit releases of arsenic, benzene and dozens of other air toxics linked to serious health problems.
In S.J. Res. 31, a Congressional Review Act resolution introduced late last week, Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) and three colleagues — including Environment and Public Works Chair Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) — seek to scrap Clean Air Act regulations unveiled last September under then-President Joe Biden as a replacement for the “once in, always in” policy rescinded in 2020.
That policy — spelled out in a 1995 EPA memo — applied to refiners, paper mills and other industrial polluters subject to “maximum achievable” pollution control standards because they had the potential to release at least 10 tons of a single air toxic or 25 tons of any combination of such hazardous pollutants.
On the grounds that polluters could otherwise backslide, those stringent standards stayed in place even if a plant’s emissions later dropped below “major source” levels.
