A House Republican plan to delay the Environmental Protection Agency’s aggressive climate rules could stymie President Obama’s goal of reaching a global climate deal in Paris at the end of the year.
The House plan was announced Monday in the form of draft legislation by Rep. Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, the chairman of the House Energy and Commece Committee’s energy and power subcommittee.
Whitfield told a group of reporters that the bill addresses states’ concerns about EPA’s tight compliance window. States will have to file plans with the EPA beginning in 2016 on how they will comply. Whitfield and energy committee leaders want to push the timeline back to ease state compliance and allow the courts time to rule on the EPA regulations.
Whitfield said the reason the administration “is moving so quickly” to implement the rules is because of the Paris talks scheduled for the end of the year, where the rules are seen as the lynchpin in securing a global deal on reducing carbon emissions that many scientists say are warming the climate. The administration hopes that the carbon reductions under the power-plant regulations will convince other countries that the U.S. is serious about reducing its carbon dioxide emissions and encourage them follow suit, says observers.
The president “wants to present the strongest case on the United States being the leader in addressing CO2 emissions,” Whitfield said. “That’s fine, except the American people didn’t sign up for this and we don’t know what the impact is really going to be, nor does the president.”
The draft bill would delay the rules while waiting for the regulations to be litigated in federal appeals court, where about 12 states have a pending lawsuit against EPA.
Proponents of the EPA rules say there is reason to be concerned about the Paris talks. They see measures such as the draft legislation spelling trouble for the president that could hurt his leverage to negotiate. If a debate is raging back in the states on rolling back the rules, that likely would undermine his attempts to demonstrate a U.S. commitment to cuts, they say.
The U.N. climate talks are an attempt to reach an international consensus for major carbon dioxide reductions that would lower the Earth’s temperature by two degrees.
The Whitfield draft legislation give states the ability to delay compliance with the aggressive regulations if they find the climate rules would hurt reliability or would raise consumers’ bills.
“We simply think there are other issues … than being number one on CO2” reductions, Whitfield said.
A handful of states support the EPA rules, with California, New York, Massachusetts and a few others being the major proponents among them. But many more states, including Whitfield’s home state of Kentucky, are fighting the measure in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
“We don’t know what is going to happen in that lawsuit,” or whether the argument is “ripe, or not” for judicial review, Whitfield said. “But if it’s not ripe [and the rule is made final], there will be another lawsuit. So, we know it’s going to be ending up in the court.”
The lawsuits were filed against EPA while the climate rules are in their proposal stage. Typically, the appellate court will not review a lawsuit on a federal regulation unless it has been made final. EPA is slated to finalize the rules this summer.
