Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Article addresses one of the most hotly contested issues in environmental law today - the New Source Review (NSR) modification requirement - and proposes a vastly simpler and superior approach. Over the last few years there have been three federal appellate court decisions, five district court decisions, five EPA rulemakings, and copious Congressional bills dealing with, or directly influencing, various aspects of this requirement. Underlying all of this action lays one contentious issue: How and to what extent should this nation force older, originally grandfathered power plants to upgrade their pollution control equipment? This issue is so divisive because power plant pollution is the greatest single source of air pollution in this country, yet low-cost power is critical to this nation's economy. According to a recent Congressional report, power plant pollution kills approximately 30,000 people annually - about the same amount as the annual deaths from drunk driving and homicides combined. Yet, because of various grandfathering provisions, only about one-quarter of all power plants have completely updated pollution control equipment and over sixty percent are wholly exempt from many Clean Air Act (CAA) requirements. This Article addresses this grandfathering conundrum in detail, examining the law, technology, and prominent scholarly proposals, and provides the most probable and feasible solution: the MEBACT approach. The critical notion presented in this Article is that the current structure of the Clean Air Act and its regulations exacerbate the grandfathering problems. In other words, the trouble with typical age-discriminating regulations only partially explains the inherent flaws in the Clean Air Act's grandfathering provisions. The principle dilemma, what some have termed the unintended disincentive in the Clean Air Act, is that when existing sources are modified, they must comply with the same extremely stringent standards as new sources. Recent empirical economic studies have shown that this unintended disincentive in the CAA has retarded modification rates and done little to hasten old-plant closings, which was a central purpose of these culprit provisions when enacted. This Article argues for the removal of these retarding CAA provisions (namely NSR and NSPS) for existing fossil-fuel electric generating units and proposes a new legislative approach for dealing with these sources. More specifically, this Article argues that given the current emissions trading regimes, Congress should enact a new section of the Clean Air Act addressing existing fossil-fuel electric generating units which would: (1) exempt all existing fossil-fuel generating units from NSPS and NSR; (2) introduce a new form of technology forcing timeline for all existing units; and (3) introduce a new type of technology forcing standard called the Most Effective Best Available Control Technology (MEBACT) standard.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".