EPA Wants the Power to Regulate Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Coal-fired Power Plants

Endorsing Rockefeller's Approach to Carbon Emissions

June 14, 2010

American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) - Last week, 47 Senators said that EPA should not use the Clean Air Act as the mechanism to regulate greenhouse gases (GHGs). AISI agrees.

Use of the Clean Air Act will cause enormous damage to energy intensive, trade exposed industries like steelmaking, which finds itself confronted by an aggressive, government-owned and subsidized Chinese steel industry that now produces fully half of the world’s steel; while exporting a lot of that steel here to the United States. This is the same Chinese government that has indicated it has no intention of burdening its “developing” steel or other industries with any similar carbon costs.

But even though the Murkowski resolution failed, we do know that there are an additional five Democratic Senators who voted against the Murkowski resolution but who are also cosponsors of Senator Rockefeller’s bill, which would delay EPA regulation by two years. Should Senator Reid allow a vote on the Rockefeller bill, it will easily pass the Senate.

Senate passage would be a good first step, and if it becomes law, it would allow the Congress time to deal with the big issue. And despite the claims from some quarters, the Rockefeller bill is very carefully crafted so as not to disrupt the new EPA and DOT vehicle regulations.

It is harder to divine exactly what last week’s vote means for the prospects of passing a big economy-wide cap and trade bill like Kerry-Lieberman this year, since the chances of that happening this year were already pretty slim.

I think the more important development this week was the introduction of Senator Lugar’s new bill. The existence of alternatives like the Lugar bill, the Cantwell/Collins bill, and the bipartisan energy bill by Senator Bingaman demonstrates just how hard it will be to gain 60 votes for any one approach in the few working days left in the session before the Supreme Court nomination, spending bills and elections intervene. Further, serious alternatives like Cantwell/Collins and now Lugar have not received the attention they deserve in the rush to embrace economy-wide cap and trade as the sole solution.

I think Senator Graham had it right when he said that cap and trade is dead, at least as regards the big economy-wide cap and trade bills that have received most of the attention in the Senate thus far.

Senator Rockefeller’s two-year time out on regulations would give the Congress the time to look at alternatives to economy-wide cap and trade, allow EPA and DOT to proceed with the vehicle rules, and prevent harm to the steel industry and others in the interim. And in anticipation of the inevitable “they don’t want to do anything” slander, for the next two years we will do the same thing as we have done for the last twenty years: continue to steadily reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and improve the energy efficiency of what is already the lowest emitting (33% reduction in GHG emissions since 1990) and most energy efficient (33% reduction in energy intensity per ton of steel) steelmaking industry in the world.

The Case for EPA Action (Excerpt)

April 15, 2010

The Nation - On April 1 the Environmental Protection Agency established rules restricting greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks, starting in 2012. This is the first of what could become a sweeping series of regulations stemming from the agency's conclusion that greenhouse gases harm human health. If the EPA were to act robustly, it could achieve significant and immediate greenhouse gas emissions reductions using nothing more than existing laws and current technology. Doing so would signal to a waiting world that America is serious about addressing climate change.

But a dangerous assault on the agency is gathering momentum in Congress, corporate boardrooms, the media and the courts. The swarm of counterattacks all seek to strip the EPA of its power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources like coal-fired power plants. Some legislative proposals would even undo the EPA's finding that greenhouse gases are hazardous, taking the EPA out of the climate fight altogether ...

At first, President Obama seemed ready to use executive power to do an end run around a sclerotic Congress, when he authorized the EPA to start regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Obama was merely complying with the law: the EPA has been mandated to act since 2007, when the Supreme Court ruled, in Massachusetts v. EPA, that the agency should determine whether greenhouse gases threaten our health. The Bush administration refused to use this authority, but when Obama took office he allowed the EPA to do its job again.

This past December the EPA published a science-based "endangerment finding," which found that CO2 and five other greenhouse gases are, in fact, dangerous to human life. Once the EPA issues an endangerment finding, it is legally bound to promulgate regulations to address the problem; the first of these were the vehicle emissions reductions announced on April 1.

Now the EPA is following up by drafting regulations for stationary greenhouse gas sources. Called a tailoring rule, it will stipulate when, where and how greenhouse gas pollution must be controlled. At first the agency said it would regulate facilities emitting 25,000 tons or more of greenhouse gases per year. But pressure from fossil fuel industries and Congress has caused the EPA to backpedal to a threshold of 75,000 tons per year, a limit the EPA could raise to 100,000 tons by the time its tailoring rule is finalized.

In February, Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia sent a letter urging EPA administrator Lisa Jackson to delay the implementation of greenhouse gas point source review. Signing on with Rockefeller were seven other Democratic senators, all but one from the nation's top coal-producing states. In response, Jackson pushed back any new regulations until 2011--conveniently after this fall's midterm election. Rockefeller wasn't satisfied and has since introduced legislation seeking to suspend EPA action until after 2012.

Because the tailoring rule is not yet final, the whole issue of stationary source regulation could get put off indefinitely, or be pre-empted by climate change legislation that strips the EPA of its regulatory powers.

The fight over the EPA's role goes back to 1997, when President Clinton signed, but could not get the Senate to ratify, the Kyoto Protocol ...

Senator Lisa Murkowski's (R-AK) resolution was introduced January 21 under the little-used Congressional Review Act, which means it needs only fifty-one votes to pass and cannot be blocked from a vote by Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Although it is called a "resolution of disapproval," it would have the force of law. So far forty other senators are on board, including three Democrats--Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

In the House, Joe Barton, a Republican from Texas, has written a companion resolution of disapproval. Not surprisingly, Barton is tight with polluters; over the past two decades he has received more than $2.7 million in direct campaign contributions from electrical utilities and the petroleum industry.

Obama would, by all accounts, veto the Murkowski or Barton bill. But their point is not so much to gut the EPA in Congress as it is to intimidate, delay, confuse and blunt into irrelevance any EPA action. Other pushbacks are taking the form of lawsuits and petitions from the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and fossil fuel lobbies. Fifteen states have filed suits seeking to block the EPA's endangerment ruling, and at least seventeen state legislatures have seen bills introduced to strip EPA powers. None of these efforts are likely to achieve their stated goals, but they are all part of a right-wing and corporate strategy to send a message to Obama and the Senate, where real EPA-stripping could happen if Kerry-Lieberman-Graham passes ...