The $1 trillion spending bill congressional leaders unveiled late Tuesday includes a few policy provisions that irked environmental groups, but lawmakers largely avoided wading into more contentious energy and environment battles that have plagued budget-making in the past.
Republicans have proposed many of the environmental “riders,” which give directives on policy, in the past. The resurfacing of those riders could lead to squabbling ahead of an eventual vote on the fiscal 2015 budget.
Absent from the spending bill, however, were any riders restricting the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants. Those proposed rules are the centerpiece of President Obama’s climate agenda, and will be in the crosshairs of the GOP-controlled Congress that takes over in January. And in a break from other spending bills that have come from the House, the legislation lacks a rider barring funding of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific panel that conservatives have long criticized over global warming.
Still, environmental groups were displeased with a couple of items that found their way into the spending bill.
A provision aimed at delaying potential endangered species designation for the greater sage-grouse, a grazing bird found in the West, ruffled feathers among wilderness groups.
“Delaying much-needed protections for this imperiled species and completely ignoring well-documented significant scientific conclusions on population decline and habitat loss will not make this issue go away,” Defenders of Wildlife President Jamie Rappaport Clark said. “The plight of the sage-grouse is sounding the alarm on a multitude of threats being imposed on the sagebrush habitat that they and hundreds of other species.”
The bird has seen its population dwindle to between 200,000 and 500,000, with a 30 percent drop since 1985, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. But its habitat is often at conflict with energy development. Republicans worry an endangerment listing would thwart oil and gas development, as the office of House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky., said such an action “could have severe economic consequences in Western states.”
Environmental groups were also upset that the spending bill didn’t include reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which expires in September 2015. The 50-year-old program uses royalties from offshore oil and gas revenues to pay for conservation projects, easements for hunting and fishing and battlefield restoration. It’s funded at $306 million this year, though far below the full authorized level of $900 million.
The spending bill also preserves language that would block implementation of part of Obama’s climate agenda by restoring public financing of overseas coal-fired power plants through the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.
Obama had directed the lenders to resist funding those projects unless there were no other alternatives in extremely impoverished areas. Environmentalists cheered it as an effort to reduce global carbon emissions, and other institutional financiers such as the World Bank copied the policy.
But language preventing the policy found its way into spending legislation last year. Green groups had been hoping a push to shed more light on the issue would get lawmakers to reverse course.
“Continued inclusion of this rider directly contradicts our nation’s responsibility to combat climate change and should be rejected, along with the rest of the big polluters’ long list of harmful proposals,” the heads of 15 environmental groups wrote to Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski, D-Md.
Republicans see the restriction as anathema to the United States coal industry. Coal firms have turned increasingly to exports for profit because regulations and economics have pushed domestic power plants toward natural gas and renewable energy. Republicans also viewed the directive as an example of the Obama administration picking winners and losers in energy markets.
“The president is always proclaiming interest in people who are underprivileged and these other countries are coming to us. It’s a lot more economic to build a coal plant,” Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power, told the Washington Examiner.
