Legal Commentary

Heinzerling Back to Georgetown

By Jonathan H. Adler

Professor Lisa Heinzerling will be leaving her post as Assistant Administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency?s Office of Policy, Economics, and Innovation at the end of the year and returning to the Georgetown University Law Center, Politico reports.  Heinzerling has  been very active in pushing the EPA to move aggressively to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, which is no surprise as Heinzerling helped litigate Massachsuetts v. EPA. Yet according to Politico, everyone at EPA may not share this view:

Within EPA, Heinzerling is one of the more dogmatic proponents of regulating greenhouse gases to the maximum extent possible under the Clean Air Act.

There are two camps within the agency on climate, said an environmental advocate who spoke on background. The Heinzerling camp, with the mind-set that, ?we have the law on our side; let?s go get them.? In the other camp are Administrator Lisa Jackson and EPA air chief Gina McCarthy, who are trying to maintain the support of the White House and Congress.

An EPA spokesman denied there are competing ?camps? within EPA, and even if there are, this may have nothing to do with Heinzerling?s departure.  It is rather common for universities to impose a two-year limit on academic leaves of this sort, and not at all unusual for an academic to limit any given government stint to two years.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on November 05, 2010 (boomark / email).