Attempting to regulate the temperature of the planet by readjusting the mixture of gases in the atmosphere would be the most ambitious project undertaken by human beings. Nothing that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has done previously matches this task, but perhaps the closest analogy in EPA's history is implementing the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act (CAA). The lessons learned from EPA's implementation of the 1990 Amendments can provide valuable insight for the implementation of future climate change legislation.

Prof. Michael Gerrard mentioned that the WaxmanMarkey Bill, as passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, would require EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to conduct 145 rulemakings. The 1990 Amendments to the CAA imposed a roughly comparable burden. The 1990 Amendments required EPA to do 120 rulemakings, prepare 90 studies and reports for presentation to the U.S. Congress, and complete 55 of those rulemakings in the first two years. To put that in perspective, in the years just prior to the 1990 Amendments, the air program at EPA had been doing, on average, only about five to eight new rules a year. The EPA air program thus had to increase its pace of rulemaking by about 400%. We recognized early on that it was not going to be possible to implement the CAA of 1990 without changing the way that the Agency did business.