It's not clear when the American Petroleum Institute expanded its mandate to represent the baked goods industry, but in a statement responding to the Environmental Protection Agency's proposed greenhouse gas endangerment finding it warned that the proposal could result in complex and costly requirements on bakeries.
The API also raised the possibility of those requirements falling on restaurants, colleges, schools, shopping malls, and many other businesses and institutions, presumably including the oil and gas industry. The proposed finding poses a danger "to the American economy and every American family," API said.
The endangerment proposal, which is subject to a 60-day comment period, determined that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and the environment within the meaning of the Clean Air Act. EPA was complying with a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that directed it to determine whether greenhouse gases cause global warming; if they threaten health and the environment; and if the agency should regulate them under the Clean Air Act.
Although it has taken a different position in the past, API no longer publicly questions the climate science that attributes current warming to greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activities. Nor does it challenge the endangerment finding on the grounds that greenhouse gas emissions don't pose a health and environmental threat.
But API does argue that the Clean Air Act, which was "created to address local and regional air pollution," is the wrong tool to address emissions of greenhouse gases - which is not mean that the oil industry has always supported Clean Air Act regulations to address local and regional air pollution.
EPA noted that the proposed endangerment finding "would not itself impose any requirements on industry or other entities." It also said an endangerment under one provision of the Clean Air Act would not "automatically trigger regulation under the entire Act."
The Obama administration would prefer comprehensive legislation to address global warming as opposed to EPA regulations. Representative Edward Markey, Democrat-Massachusetts, who co-authored a climate bill to be considered this week by a House panel, suggested that the endangerment finding would spur Congress to legislate.
But for API, which has long opposed mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions in any guise, neither regulation nor legislation is a palatable alternative.
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