Former President Bill Clinton’s Environmental Protection Agency chief, Carol Browner, says Republicans have “no clue” that it was them who inadvertently put the agency on the road to regulating greenhouse emissions that are blamed for climate change.
Browner, speaking Monday at an event in Washington, recalled a conversation she had nearly a quarter-century ago with then House Republican Whip Tom DeLay of Texas, which put the EPA on track to regulate manmade carbon dioxide emissions, which many scientists blame for increasing severe weather, droughts and the polar ice caps melting.
Browner recalls that DeLay had asked her if the EPA was preparing to regulate greenhouse gases. “I said, I am not sure if we have the authority” to do that, she recalled during a hearing in Congress. DeLay told her to “go ask your lawyers,” and Browner said she did.
EPA lawyers, said the agency did have the authority if it determined a public health risk. The rest is history, she recalled, with the Supreme Court deciding in the EPA’s favor in the landmark case Massachusetts v. EPA that said the agency could regulate carbon emissions.
The agency used the authority granted to it under amendments to the Clean Air Act pushed into law by President George H.W. Bush’s presidency in 1990, which now form the basis of the centerpiece of President Obama’s climate change agenda, the Clean Power Plan.
“Tom DeLay has no clue that his little question” inspired a “whole raft” of climate rules, Browner said, marking the 25th anniversary of the 1990s amendments that inspired his query, she said.
Browner served as the White House climate change czar under President Obama’s first term.
She marked the anniversary of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments by saying it “really is that law that … allowed us to make the program we have made, not only on [controlling pollutants like] smog and soot but also climate change.”
Browner spoke at the National Press Club Monday as a member of the Climate Advisers group, with former Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the former chairman of the House energy committee who co-authored landmark climate change legislation when his party had the majority. The bill stalled in the Senate in 2009.
Monday’s event also was used to issue a new study by the Climate Advisers on negotiations ahead of December’s climate change meeting in Paris, where all countries will come together to hash out a global agreement on greenhouse gas emission reductions.
The Clean Power Plan is a key part of the commitments that President Obama made to the United Nations earlier this year to help secure a deal in Paris. The plan is being opposed by 26 states, 25 trade groups, labor unions and many others in federal appeals court.
The climate rule would place states on the hook to reduce emissions a third by 2030. The states argue that the plan oversteps the EPA’s authority by seeking to regulate states, rather than individual power plants, under the Clean Air Act.
Republican lawmakers have introduced resolutions of disapproval in the House and Senate that would repeal the climate rules.
