EPA Angling to Set Up Cap-and-Trade, Official Tells ABA Event

Anna Marie Wood, a senior policy analyst at the EPA, said at an American Bar Association event that the agency may set up a cap-and-trade system relying on the Clean Air Act, Bloomberg reported. Wood was quoted as saying: "We're considering all that right now and thinking about what might make sense [because] we think that there's a lot of progress that can be made using certain tools under the Clean Air Act."

Allan Bedwell, a VP at Cantor CO2e, the emission markets unit for Cantor Fitzgerald LP, said the Obama administration's budget request showed the EPA's interest in carbon trading under existing law and there are "continuing signals from the agency that they're looking at this and evaluating this internally."

Meanwhile, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked EPA to reconsider regulating CO2, The Hill reported. In a statement, the chamber said: "The EPA has admitted that such an unprecedented regulatory expansion would 'paralyze' and 'overwhelm' permitting authorities, leaving businesses waiting months or even years to get the permits they need to keep operating. This admission by the EPA undermines the basis for the endangerment finding, and justifies reopening the process."

- Related stories also appeared in The Detroit News and LegalNewsline.com.