The Whiting, Indiana oil refinery

The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Hawthorne reports that the Obama Environmental Protection Agency has reversed another decision made by the Bush EPA. The Bush EPA approved expanding a BP oil refinery in northwest Indiana, a few miles southeast of downtown Chicago. But the Obama EPA says that BP and the Indiana Dept. of Environmental Management never properly tested to see how soot and smog emissions would impact the surrounding metropolitan area. So BP now has 90 days to explain how they will comply with the Clean Air Act — or they risk losing the permit granted by the Bush EPA.

The new EPA has limits, though, in how far it will deviate from the old one:

The agency rejected a plea in the environmental groups’ petition to impose limits on greenhouse gases in BP’s permit. According to BP, heat-trapping pollution from the refinery is expected to rise 40 percent when the expansion is done, an amount equivalent to adding 320,000 cars to the nation’s highways.

The Obama administration is pushing Congress to enact the first limits on climate change pollution and vows to use the Clean Air Act to do so if it fails to act. But the EPA concluded the BP permit is not the proper forum to address the problem — at this point, at least.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that EPA must use the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases. How long will the Obama administration wait for Congress to pass an energy security before it takes matters into its own hands?

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