The Environmental Protection Agency’s top air regulator said that the agency is seriously considering changes to its draft rule for regulating carbon emissions from power plants.
EPA Air and Radiation Administrator Janet McCabe noted that public comments from states and other entities affected by the proposed rule have highlighted areas for improvement.
“There are some factual conclusions that need to be rethought,” McCabe said Wednesday at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on the proposal, which aims to slash electricity emissions 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
The hearing did little to move the chains for the picked-over regulation, the centerpiece of President Obama’s second-term climate agenda. Democrats have vowed to sustain the regulation as well.
“Nobody ever complained that the air was too clean,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the panel’s top Democrat.
Conservatives, coal-state lawmakers and industry groups want to scrap the rule because they say it will raise electricity rates — committee Chairman Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., called the proposal “the most regressive tax increase you can have,” while Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker called it “EPA’s most blatant overreach.”
But Congress can’t do much at this point to stop the rule.
It cannot invoke the Congressional Review Act, a maneuver that would allow Congress to vote to block a regulation, until the rule is final. Even then, though, that likely would face a veto from Obama.
Starving the agency from finishing the rule through the budget isn’t an option, either, since the rule is expected to be completed this summer. The current fiscal year budget runs through September.
However, Congress could try to restrict the spending needed to implement the rule and to assess state compliance plans in fiscal 2016. It also could try to attach riders to prevent the rule from taking effect. Whether Democrats would go along with that strategy is questionable given how much Obama has pushed the regulation.
“The Republican caucus is considering all options and looking at a unified step forward,” Donelle Harder, a Republican spokeswoman for the Environment and Public Works Committee, told the Washington Examiner.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he would use the spending process to nix the power plant regulation. But the Kentucky Republican has said he won’t risk a government shutdown, either. And Obama has pledged to defend the proposal, as he views climate change as a legacy issue.
An eventual challenge will surface in the courts. States are planning to challenge the proposed rule through lawsuits once it’s finalized, as many have already challenged it in draft form. Others might choose to avoid implementing it altogether, or adhere to emissions reductions only “within the fence line” — meaning at the actual smokestack, the only area opponents believe the EPA can regulate through the Clean Air Act.
“When a majority of states object to a rule, then I think you’ve done something wrong,” said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo.
While more than half of states filed public comments opposing the regulation to some degree, McCabe said that, through conversations that the agency has had, “we know that states are beginning to think about the very real task” of complying with the rule.
McCabe also defended the agency’s legal authority to call for emissions reductions beyond the perimeter of power plants. The proposed rule suggests states could achieve emissions reductions by improving efficiency at power plants, shifting from coal-fired power to natural gas, adding more renewable energy and increasing energy efficiency by consumers.
McCabe noted that while the agency set individual targets for state emissions reductions, it doesn’t prescribe a way to achieve those targets.
“In fact, we believe that some can do more in one area and some may choose to do less in another area,” McCabe said.
