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President Bush and a prominent House Democrat have struck a nerve with their warnings that a "glorious mess" would afflict Americans if Congress doesn't stop federal regulators from tackling climate change on their own.
Bush and Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, both described a bureaucratic brigade poised to craft climate rules using environmental laws written more than 30 years ago.
Soon, they warned, U.S. EPA and other federal agencies will be drafting rules that seek to reduce heat-trapping emissions from power plants, motor vehicles and even small users and producers of energy, such as schools, stores, hospitals and apartment buildings.
"This," Bush said in a Rose Garden speech last week, "would make the federal government act like a local planning and zoning board, have crippling effects on our entire economy."
Environmentalists and some liberal Democrats say that is hogwash.
"We should use every tool at our disposal," Robert Sussman, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, wrote this week in an article titled "Global Warming Red Herring."
Sussman, a former U.S. EPA deputy administrator under President Clinton, said he questioned Bush's sincerity on this issue given that the administration had fought every step of the way to defeat the very petition that tried to get the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases from cars and trucks.
Bush lost that case, Massachusetts v. EPA, in the Supreme Court last year. In response, the president called the decision "the new law of the land" and ordered EPA to begin implementing it.
More than a year later, Sussman complained that Bush's EPA has dragged its feet, giving the president little room to criticize the potential for new climate regulations.
"The president's comments reflect a knee-jerk assumption that existing laws cannot be applied to climate change without creating a quagmire," wrote Sussman, who also is advising the presidential campaign of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.
"Before throwing up its hands in frustration, the Bush administration should do its homework and examine whether these laws can be used to address significant contributors to climate change without burdening insignificant actors with red tape."
David Doniger, policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council's climate center, also has been poking holes in the Bush administration's arguments.
On the NRDC blog, Doniger wrote of "The Phony 'Train Wreck'" that Bush advisers claim is coming if the Clean Air Act and other laws are used to address climate change. Doniger rejected Bush's comment that the Clean Air Act was not written with climate change in mind, citing a Capitol Hill debate in 1970 where lawmakers said EPA must curb any pollution that threatens health, climate and the weather.
"History was not the president's best subject," Doniger said.
The environmentalist also took on Bush's comment that climate regulations under the Clean Air Act would hurt the economy. Just as it does with other environmental issues, Doniger insisted that EPA could set new greenhouse gas standards for cars and trucks that take into account the availability of technology, costs, lead-time, safety and energy.
"Nothing fancy," Doniger said. "No economic ruin. Just do what's technically feasible taking into account costs."
Doniger also said he doubted EPA would be forced into regulating climate-changing gases from schools, stores and other small users. "Would you be surprised to learn that no one is asking EPA to do this?" he said.
Bush and Dingell appear to have different motivations for using nearly identical rhetoric.
In the buildup to the president's announcement, White House advisers last week warned of the "regulatory train wreck" coming thanks to the Supreme Court's decision. Bush even quoted Dingell in the Rose Garden, referring to the "glorious mess" that the Michigan Democrat said would come from new EPA climate regulations.
Yet Bush did not specifically say what he wanted Congress to do about it. Instead, he offered a voluntary plan to address climate change that included a call to stabilize domestic emissions by 2025 -- a target far weaker than anything being debated on Capitol Hill.
By contrast, Dingell's warnings came with the caveat that Congress would soon pass a much more aggressive new U.S. climate law. Dingell has not yet released any legislative language. But the lawmaker on several occassions has said that his midcentury target would be 60 percent to 80 percent below current emission levels.
Bush's top environmental adviser, Jim Connaughton, defended the president's speech in an interview last week, saying EPA stands poised to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as soon it publishes an "endangerment finding" that determines carbon dioxide is a pollutant harmful to public health and the environment.
Connaughton, the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, cited House testimony delivered earlier this month in front of Dingell's committee.
There, Robert Meyers, a top political appointee in EPA's air pollution office, described several potential areas for new EPA regulation, including limits on tailpipe emissions and fuels, New Source Review permits and a broad new National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) that would measure greenhouse gas concentrations in all 50 states.
If past EPA experience was an indication, Meyers said a NAAQS for climate change could take a decade to write and implement, with additional scientific reviews every five years.
Under questioning from several Democrats, Meyers would not give any hints as to the agency's decision on the endangerment finding. He would only say that EPA planned to release an analysis of the issue later this spring.
Meyers would not say what annual emission thresholds EPA would use to determine what industrial sources face climate regulations. Connaughton was not ready to give an official number, either, but he did caution that the current levels for other traditional pollutants would not match up with greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.
"The Clean Air Act was never designed to handle this kind of emissions," Connaughton said.
Some key Democratic lawmakers engaged in the climate debate say they want to act before EPA.
"I don't think it's a red herring," said Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat and the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. "I think we need to sort this issue out as part of enacting a cap-and-trade system. We need to make clear where the responsibility for this regulation continues to be and which parts of it are done through which law."
Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware agreed. "That's where you resolve those issues, is for us to legislate," he said.
But others insist EPA should not wait for Congress, considering that there is no clear consensus on when a new climate policy will be signed into law.
"When Congress does cap and trade, there'll be litigation on that," said Rep. Henry Waxman of California. "I'm not arguing against cap and trade. I'm for the legislation. But until that happens, to do nothing is very, very harmful."
Click here to read David Doniger's blog entry.
Click here to read Robert Sussman's article.
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