What a difference an election can make.

While the House approved sweeping cap-and-trade climate legislation last Congress, a key House subcommittee today is expected to approve by a wide margin a bill to permanently strip U.S. EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, oil refineries and other major stationary sources.

It is unclear whether the Energy and Power Subcommittee vote will break down strictly along party lines or whether one or more Democrats will vote for H.R. 910 from Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.).

Alyson Heyrend, a spokeswoman for Rep. Jim Matheson (D-Utah), said her boss was still weighing his options and considering offering amendments.

Rep. Gene Green (D-Texas) said yesterday he would not vote for the Upton bill but instead is crafting his own measure that would delay EPA's carbon regulations for several years and require further study of their implications.

"We've got some concepts and ideas and we're working on them, but we haven't put them in a drafting form," he said.

Green, an "oil patch" Democrat who supported the cap-and-trade bill in 2009, said he is in favor of federal action on climate change. "But I want to do it in such a way that we can actually deal with it, instead of just making it a political issue," he said.

Green said he expects the Upton bill to stall in the Senate and plans to offer his own bill as an alternative when that happens. He said he expects other House Democrats from fossil-fuel dependent and manufacturing districts to support the measure, including committee members Matheson and Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.).

But some other moderate Democrats are likely to vote for Upton's bill. Reps. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and Dan Boren (D-Okla.) are already co-sponsors.

"I kidded Nick. I said, 'You're putting pressure on us that come from refining areas because the coal guys are jumping on the bill,'" Green said.

In addition to the prohibition on stationary source rules, Upton's measure also would prevent EPA from crafting any future greenhouse gas tailpipe emissions standards for vehicles after model year 2016.

Upton and other committee Republicans say that by stopping EPA's current and planned regulations, Congress can save industry and consumers from facing a sharp increase in energy costs right as the U.S. economy is beginning to crawl out of recession.

"Previous congressional efforts to regulate and put a price on greenhouse gas emissions were estimated to increase the price of a gallon of gasoline by 19 cents in 2015 and 95 cents in 2050," said Upton and Energy and Power Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) in a joint statement earlier in the week. The two lawmakers were referring to Republican analyses of the carbon dioxide cap-and-trade bill that passed the House in 2009. The measure, which was sponsored by then-Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass), did not receive a vote in the Senate.

"While estimates are not available for the full cost of the litany of regulations being proposed and contemplated by the EPA -- in large measure because the EPA has refused to conduct an economic analysis -- per [EPA Administrator] Lisa Jackson herself, greenhouse gas regulation is expected to impose even greater economic costs than the bills that ultimately failed in Congress," Upton and Whitfield said.

But while opponents of EPA regulation have generally relied on their past estimates of cap-and-trade legislation to argue that EPA's carbon rules would be expensive, proponents of climate regulation point to a cost-benefit analysis released on March 1 by EPA, which looked broadly at the Clean Air Act from 1990 to 2020.

EPA estimated that the cost savings of its regulations -- such as avoided health care expenses -- would outweigh the expense of those rules by 2020. But the agency has not analyzed the cost of its greenhouse gas programs alone.

Franz Matzner, the legislative director for the Natural Resources Defense Council's climate center, said EPA's past success in ratcheting down other pollutants under the Clean Air Act shows the agency is likely to craft sensible rules for greenhouse gas emissions, too.

"There is a 40-year track record of EPA doing this the right way," Matzner said, noting that the first carbon restrictions phased in on Jan. 2 "and the sky hasn't fallen."

The Clean Air Act specifies that EPA must take cost into consideration when promulgating regulations.

"Permits are done case by case, and affordability is a built-in requirement -- pollution controls have to be cost effective to be considered," Matzner said.

Other Clean Air Act regs

In addition to the disagreement over cost, proponents and opponents of Upton's bill differ on whether it would actually change the Clean Air Act. Upton and others who oppose EPA regulation of greenhouse gases argue that Congress never intended to regulate heat-trapping emissions when it passed the Clean Air Act and its amendments. By stripping EPA of its greenhouse gas regulatory authorities, they say Congress can restore the original intent of the law as a vehicle to limit criterion pollutants.

"It doesn't change the Clean Air Act," Upton told reporters earlier in the week. "It doesn't weaken the particulates that were outlined when Congress passed that before. That's a little bit of a red herring."

But environmentalists and their allies in Congress point to a 2007 Supreme Court decision that EPA does have the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act.

Many Republicans in the House also voted for amendments to a continuing spending bill last month that would limit other EPA Clean Air Act regulations not related to carbon, including the agency's new regulations for toxic air pollution from cement kilns.

Matzner said this showed that many lawmakers want to see changes to more than just EPA climate rules.

"It's patently implausible to argue that they don't have their sights on all of the standards that industry doesn't like," he said.

Whitfield has said that later in the year his subcommittee will take a second look at the Clean Air Act as a whole.

"We're going to look at a lot of these regulations, because I think a lot of them have just gone by ... and the only people noticing them are those immediately impacted. But the broader society is not really focused on this," he said yesterday.

"We're not averse to going in and changing the Clean Air Act if we think it needs to be changed, and we would be happy to do that," he added.

Whitfield named several EPA rules as deserving of congressional scrutiny, including the new air transport rule, which targets sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emissions from power plants.