EPA’s tortuous battle to salvage a nationwide smog control plan has taken another turn with the release of a lengthy rebuttal to objections that prompted a Supreme Court freeze on implementation.
While foes characterize the ”good neighbor” plan as an interlocking whole, “it would not matter if there were one state or 50 states” in the overall framework, EPA wrote in the newly released “supplemental response to comments.” The “methodology and the result for any particular state … would remain the same.”
The rebuttal, posted online late Tuesday, encompasses a broad defense of the plan’s “severability,” or the extent to which it still works even if covering fewer states than first intended.
In its 5-4 decision to stay the plan, the Supreme Court majority in June found that EPA had failed to reasonably address concerns on that score after a series of other legal losses had stalled implementation in more than half of the states originally covered.
