The 1990 Clean Air Act amendments copied the Clean Water Act’s permit regime.

Evidence

In 1990, Congress responded to the growing consensus that the CAA’s lack of a CWA-type permit requirement worked to the CAA’s disadvantage by adding to the CAA a broadly applicable permit requirement applicable, inter alia, to major stationary sources. Many of the details of the CAA’s new permit program, including monitoring and reporting requirements, were modeled directly upon the CWA’s NPDES permit system applicable to point sources. As with the CWA, the new CAA provisions allowed for individual states to take over the administration of the permit program, so long as they met a list of statutorily prescribed criteria. As a result, while the NAAQS may have been the ultimate driving force behind much of the CAA, they were no longer the actual, immediate basis of pollution controls any more than ambient standards were the basis of the CWA. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 768

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Federally required self-monitoring reports became the linchpin of citizen-suit enforcement — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 399