Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt said Thursday that the courts had struck down President Barack Obama-era climate rules for coal power plants, despite a midnight Thursday deadline for filing comments on the agency’s proposal to repeal those very rules.
“There were two efforts made by the previous administration to regulate CO2, and both of them were struck down by the courts,” Pruitt said at an afternoon hearing of the House Appropriations Committee’s interior subcommittee.
Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, fired back, thinking he was talking about fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas rules for cars, known as the CAFE standards.
“CAFE standards were not struck down by the courts,” Pingree said.
“That’s not the issue we’re talking about here,” Pruitt said. “The tailoring rule that the previous administration adopted with respect to CO2, and then the Clean Power Plan.”
It became clear that Pruitt, Oklahoma’s former attorney general, had conflated a Supreme Court stay of the power plan with it actually being struck down. The Clean Power Plan was “stayed by the U.S. Supreme Court,” which “was unprecedented,” he said.
Although Pruitt and others had read the February 2016 stay as a victory on the merits of the case, the Supreme Court’s action did not address any of their arguments. It is still up to the lower D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to address the actual legal arguments made by 28 states, including Oklahoma.
The D.C. Circuit agreed to hold its ruling in abeyance as Pruitt moves forward with his plan to repeal the regulation, which the EPA is looking to replace with a yet-to-be-determined new rule.
The deadline for submitting comments on the proposed repeal of the plan ends at midnight. Both proponents of repeal and defenders of the climate plan have dumped tens of thousands of comments into the EPA’s online docket.
Pingree said the legal status of the rules “doesn’t allow us to say we’re not going to deal with this issue.”
Pruitt fired back, “I haven’t said that,” explaining that he “can only take the steps that Congress authorizes me to take.” He said the fault of the Obama administration was it tried to get around Congress and decide the climate strategy for the U.S. through regulation.
“I have actually introduced an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking in the marketplace to solicit comment on our authority to regulate [greenhouse gas emissions],” he said.
Pruitt will seek to craft a rule through a narrow interpretation of section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act, which governs existing power plant emissions. The Obama EPA used the section to regulate emissions on a state-by-state basis, instead of a plant-by-plant basis. Oklahoma and other states argued in the D.C. Circuit that the interpretation of the law was an illegal overreach. None of that has been settled by the courts.
