Why Carbon [Dioxide] Is So Hard to Regulate - NationalJournal.com

It’s everywhere and touches everything. EPA can crack down, but only by stretching the law.
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President Obama is serious about fighting climate change in his second term, but his only real weapon for doing so is a 23-year-old law that wasn’t written with climate change in mind. This is not how he wanted to do it. It’s actually his last resort.

In a warren of back rooms at the Environmental Protection Agency’s hulking marble headquarters a few blocks from the White House, a squadron of government lawyers is laboring over the regulations of a lifetime. Obama’s climate legacy—his ability to claim he worked to save the planet from the worst ravages of global warming—rests on the bureaucrats’ ability to creatively interpret a law to solve a problem it was never meant to tackle.