Sen. Jim Inhofe is pursuing a robust agenda that includes shredding the Environmental Protection Agency’s cost estimates for new air quality rules, while going after a White House metric at the heart of the president’s climate agenda.
The Oklahoma Republican, who is chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, has been a staunch critic of the EPA and the Obama administration’s environmental policy. He has championed campaigns to undercut environmental regulations that he sees as costly and unwarranted, including EPA plans to regulate greenhouse gases that are blamed by most scientists for causing manmade climate change.
At a March 11 hearing, Inhofe took aim at EPA’s latest regulations to limit carbon dioxide from the nation’s existing power plants. He called the rules, known as the Clean Power Plan, an affront to states’ rights that would raise the cost of energy and damage power grid reliability.
He also said he was not convinced that EPA’s estimates of the rule’s benefits were accurate, noting that agency Administrator Gina McCarthy said as much at a separate hearing on the agency’s budget earlier in the month.
In a statement he issued March 4 after the budget hearing, Inhofe said he took key revelations from McCarthy’s testimony, including the hefty price tag of implementing the climate rules.
“Since the Clean Power Plan may reduce the rise of global temperatures by only .018 [degrees] Celsius by 2100, we learned from McCarthy that the real benefit of the rule is to send a ‘signal’ to other countries that America is serious about climate change,” Inhofe said.
“This so-called ‘signal’ carries a hefty price tag of $479 billion in compliance costs and a double-digit increase in electricity costs over the next decade that will significantly impact every American,” he said.
Inhofe and a group of his GOP colleagues also are pressing the White House for greater transparency in how it develops a key metric it has used to justify a variety of environmental rules based on the cost of damages that would result from manmade climate change.
In a March 9 letter to Howard Shelanski, the head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the senators pressed for a greater public viewing of what they consider hidden calculations used to justify “onerous” regulations.
The calculations, known as the social cost of carbon, are methodologies for weighing the cost savings to society from eliminating carbon dioxide, which scientists say is a key cause of global warming.
The social cost of carbon was developed through an federal interagency working group led by the White House. Until recently, it has not been subject to public scrutiny.
Many groups have criticized the administration for not making its methodology public and for not being transparent enough when it updates the metric.
“Congress and the American people deserve greater transparency and government accountability regarding the social cost of carbon,” the senators’ letter reads, referring to the cost tool as a “theoretical measure of climate change damages the administration uses to justify onerous regulations.”
Congress had lobbied the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs intensely in recent years to get the White House to allow public comments to be taken on the social cost of carbon. They finally got their wish near the end of 2013. However, it has been more than a year since the comment period closed, “and they have not responded to the comments or provided any public information on the status of the [social cost of carbon],” the letter states.
The letter has a long list of questions for the regulatory affairs office. It primarily wants to know when congressional staff will be allowed to view the social cost of carbon methodology, how comments are being incorporated into the calculations, and how the interagency working group functions in evaluating changes to the carbon cost metric. The letter requests that the office respond no later than March 30.
Inhofe also is targeting the EPA’s proposed rule for ratcheting down ozone emissions, according to another letter sent March 10 to McCarthy.
The new ozone regulations have raised concerns from industry groups and states over the cost and the fact that many regions of the country will not be able to comply.
The senator says the rules would cost an estimated $2.2 trillion in compliance costs from 2011 and 2040, while reducing the nation’s gross domestic product by $270 billion annually by putting in place the most stringent air quality standards to date.
Inhofe does not believe EPA’s cost estimates are accurate and wants the agency to answer specific questions regarding the agency’s Regulatory Impact Analysis.
The proposed ozone regulations would reduce the current air quality threshold from 75 parts per billion to 65 ppb, or even lower to 60 ppb. Industry officials say the standard is unachievable and would lead to vast swaths of the nation becoming non-attainment zones that would restrict permitting for expanding or adding industrial emitters such as factories, refineries and other manufacturing facilities.
“EPA’s recently proposed National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for ozone is likely to be the costliest rule the agency has ever proposed,” the letter reads.
EPA’s November 2014 draft analysis estimates that the cost of lowering the standard could range between $3.9 billion to nearly $39 billion in 2025. “While these numbers are high, there are significant reasons to believe that the draft RIA may underestimate the likely true cost to the American public due to a number of questionable assumptions included in the analysis,” the letter reads.
Inhofe is calling for McCarthy for have greater transparency in examining the extent of the rule’s impact.
The House Science, Space and Technology Committee will take up the ozone rule at a March 17 hearing. The full committee hearing is entitled a “Reality Check” on the “Impact and Achievability of EPA’s Proposed Ozone Standards.”
