Cap-and-Trade Opponents Gaining in Senate as EPA Moves on Greenhouse Emissions Rule

This story appears in the March 1 print edition of Transport Topics.

While U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson indicated last week that her agency was moving forward with plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, opposition to a Senate cap-and-trade bill seemed to be gaining enough momentum to block its passage.

Jackson outlined her plans, which originally were to have been implemented this year, in a letter responding to questions from several coal-state senators seeking a moratorium on EPA’s plans to propose two rules that would regulate greenhouse gas emissions, primarily for large sources such as power plants and oil refineries.

“I share your goals of ensuring economic recovery at this critical time and of addressing greenhouse gas emissions in sensible ways that are consistent with the call for comprehensive energy and climate legislation,” Jackson wrote.

Beginning in 2011, EPA will require large stationary emitters filing permit applications to address ways they will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Jackson announced. Small emitters will not be phased in until 2016.

EPA has not commented on how the agency intends to require heavy trucks to curb their emissions of carbon dioxide, but a report on the agency’s Web site projects that a rule could be proposed as early as June of this year.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also is considering a greenhouse gas emissions rule later this year but first is awaiting recommendations of a diesel fuel-efficiency study by the National Academy of Sciences, scheduled for completion later this month.

Meanwhile, opposition to cap-and-trade legislation aimed at limiting carbon emissions is growing.

American Trucking Associations has opposed the bill because the federation said it would cause a spike in diesel prices as oil producers pass costs to end-users.

Moreover, several Republicans on the Senate Environment Committee said recently that EPA’s decision to regulate greenhouse gas emissions was flawed and based on international research that is “cooked science.”

In recent months, global warming research by a United Nations panel of scientists has been shaken by the “climategate” e-mail scandal, giving opponents an opportunity to poke holes in the credibility of the agency’s global warming research.

Responding in testimony Feb. 23, Jackson rejected those allegations.

“The science behind climate change is settled, and human activity is responsible for global warming,” she said. “Not only have America’s top scientific institutions come to that conclusion, but so have numerous other industrialized countries.”

Despite Jackson’s tough talk, EPA’s greenhouse gas emissions rulemaking efforts could be stalled this year by lawsuits or by congressional action.

A total of 16 separate petitions have been filed in federal appeals court seeking to overturn the agency’s December finding that CO2 emissions endanger public health, a required step for the agency before it issues and enforces climate change rules (click here for previous story).

Also, a disapproval resolution that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) introduced in January is expected to be voted on later this month in the Senate. It seeks to strip EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

Those developments add to a growing consensus that the un-precedented cap-and-trade bill, which the House narrowly passed last June but has languished in the Senate, may not pass this year.

“The climate change supporters have lost some momentum, with the election in Massachusetts, with the economy the way it is and with Republican pot shots,” said Glen Kedzie, ATA’s vice president and environmental affairs counsel.

“While the issue isn’t going forward, it’s not going backward,” Kedzie told Transport Topics, “but it’s not going away. You can never overestimate or underestimate Congress.”

Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, agreed that cap-and-trade legislation is in serious trouble.

“If it’s not a dead duck, it’s certainly a wounded duck,” O’Donnell said.

Another disheartening sign for cap-and-trade supporters came last month when BP America Inc., ConocoPhillips Co. and Caterpillar Inc. announced they were dropping out of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of environmental groups and businesses that supports the reduction of greenhouse gases.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, Washington, said the withdrawal of support by the large corporations was yet another signal that “cap-and-trade legislation is dead in the U. S. Congress and that global warming alarmism is collapsing rapidly.”

In California, regulators recently noted growing public confusion and resistance to their own complex cap-and-trade proposal, scheduled for formal approval in October.

The California Air Resources Board got its first staff briefing on the proposed regulation in late January.

At the meeting, CARB board member Daniel Sperling called cap-and-trade the “lightening rod” of environmental regulation and said the state needs to do a better job of detailing what it will mean for those who live and work in California.

“I’m a little concerned that if we continue to be vague, it allows a lot of different groups or organizations to craft the most catastrophic scenarios,” Sperling said.

CARB Chairwoman Mary Nichols said that when various stakeholders look at how they’re going to be affected that “the fear factor takes over.”