Hearings began last week on legislation that would derail the US Environmental Protection Agency's regulation, under the Clean Air Act, of greenhouse gas emissions. They represent a triumph of public discourse and participatory government.
Not long ago, any initiative purporting to resist global warming would have had clear sailing. The popular view was that greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by human activity inexorably and unquestionably warmed the planet and that catastrophe would ensue unless people radically changed behavior, especially by slashing their use of fossil fuel. The science was said to be settled. Contrary views were rejected on sight as the wicked fulminations of unholy deniers.
How things do change.
Alarm waning
Public alarm has waned in response to questions about the scientific basis for predictions of calamitous warming and to projections about the huge costs of remediation. Political support for urgent response has weakened. Opinion polls show global warming ranks very low among things about which people worry.
The issue has momentum, nevertheless, pushed along by factions for which it long ago became a secular religion. Those factions include the unyielding environmental groups that President Barack Obama, since taking office, has been loath to upset. The Environmental Protection Agency therefore has plowed forward with its program of regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
Last month, EPA began phasing in rules requiring permits for large new and expanding greenhouse-gas emitters. Later this year, it will begin regulating emissions from existing large facilities. Now Congress, with its Republican constituency newly fortified, has balked.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing Feb. 9 on legislation that would block EPA implementation of its greenhouse gas regulations and declare that the Clean Air Act was not intended to address climate change. Committee Chairman Fred Upton (D-Mich.) authored the bill, which was matched in the Senate by legislation introduced by James Inhofe (R-Okla.). Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) introduced a similar bill Jan. 31. Early last year, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) proposed a 2-year delay in implementation of the EPA program.
The new bills represent progress from the Rockefeller bill, which purportedly was designed to give Congress time to debate the issue. The problem isn't a rushed Congress. The problem is wildly misguided regulation.
The lesser of two large problems with EPA's greenhouse gas initiative is the imposition of cost with no hope for meaningful benefit. In testimony prepared for the Feb. 9 hearing, Margo Thorning, senior vice-president and chief economist of the American Council on Capital Formation, said EPA's program "will slow investment and job growth and have no significant impact on reducing global GHG emission growth." So why does EPA press ahead? "It makes little economic or environmental sense for EPA to regulate GHGs under the Clean Air Act," Thorning said.
The even larger problem is constitutional. The proposition of sharply increased energy costs, inescapable under any effort to lower emissions of the benchmark greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, needs legislative deliberation. People exposed to the cost increases should have a voice in the outcome through representatives they elect. To impose the costs through regulation would be inappropriate. To try to impose them after Congress failed to enact climate-change legislation last year is preposterous.
Wayward path
EPA, acting under authority of a loopy decision in 2007 by the Supreme Court, started down this wayward path in part to press Congress into action on climate change. Lawmakers should consider that an institutional affront. In the face of last year's collapse of cap-and-trade legislation in the Senate, in fact, they should see EPA's persistence as the potential for a constitutional crisis.
This is an Executive Branch agency claiming control of a major dimension of the US economy in contradiction of the will of the people as expressed through Congress. Congress must stop it. Congress must set clear and permanent limits on the maverick agency's authority and behavior. Congress must act soon.
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