The House energy committee will get its turn to pick apart the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rules for existing power plants, following the Senate environment committee that bashed the rules at a hearing last week over the expected costs to states.
House Energy and Power Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., will host a Tuesday hearing aimed at peeling back the rule’s legal and cost hurdles.
“Our oversight of EPA’s power plan has already identified a host of problems, and we have a great lineup of witnesses for … hearing who will explain some of the critical legal and cost issues,” Whitfield said.
“Legal experts have raised constitutional and other questions regarding the legality of the rule, and states have expressed concerns regarding the proposal’s costs, feasibility, and impacts on consumers and electric reliability.”
Whitfield told the Washington Examiner earlier this month that the hearing will be used as a prelude to the introduction of two bills meant to brush back EPA’s climate agenda.
He is opposed to the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, as well as other stringent regulations that have proved detrimental to the coal industry in his state and others throughout the nation.
Whitfield is not looking to reverse the rules completely. Rather, the legislation he plans to introduce will seek to hobble the regulations, paring back the deadline for states to comply while allowing room for new coal plants to be built.
Tuesday’s hearing will dive into the legal hurdles facing EPA’s implementation of the new rules, underscoring where EPA went wrong in its interpretation of its legal authority under section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act.
The section of the Clean Air Act is seen as the cornerstone of implementation of the administration’s climate agenda.
A key argument being used by both states and industry groups against the rules stems from EPA’s interpretation of the law in creating the compliance framework for its plan.
The power-plant rules establish state-specific greenhouse gas reduction targets that states must begin complying with by 2020. But how states comply with the rules under the EPA proposal is where lawyers say EPA has gone awry.
The regulation makes use of what has become commonly referred to as “outside of the fence” resources to establish the state climate targets and help determine how states can comply.
This differs immensely from other power plant rules, which focus on emissions from a specific plant’s “inside the fence line,” or at the power plant itself, for compliance.
The Clean Air Act rules allow states to use renewable energy and energy efficiency programs, as well as heat-rate improvements at coal plants and more natural gas to meet the standards. These are all resources “outside the fence line” of a power plant that industry lawyers argue are outside EPA’s legal authority to enforce under the Clean Air Act.
And that only scratches the surface of the legal arguments.
Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, will be picking apart EPA’s legal authority at Tuesday’s hearing as an expert witness. Tribe submitted comments to EPA in December that were highly critical of EPA’s authority to move ahead with the plan.
“EPA’s actions serve as a breathtaking example of executive overreach and an assertion of power beyond the agency’s authority,” Tribe said then.
“The proposed rule lacks legal basis. It also represents an improper attempt by EPA unilaterally to remake a portion of the American economy on the basis of a hitherto obscure provision of the Clean Air Act, which is a fatally flawed interpretation.”
Cost concerns also will be addressed that will feature both proponents and opponents of the climate rules.
A recent study of the cost impacts of the rules performed by the private firm NERA Economic Consulting for the coal industry showed that compliance would likely exceed $366 billion, and that 43 states would face double-digit electricity price increases, while failing to significantly reduce carbon emissions to reduce global warming. Many scientists believe that the burning of fossil fuels, and the emissions that produces, is driving manmade global warming.
The NERA findings were raised at last week’s hearing in the Senate by Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.
Inhofe said the NERA findings “found that after spending $479 billion over a 15-year period we would see double-digit electricity price increase in 43 states, reduced grid reliability resulting in voltage collapse and cascading outages.”
At the same time, the EPA plan would reduce global climate emissions by less than 0.05 percent, he said.
