House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton said Wednesday that the president’s climate change agenda amounts to “a massive economy-wide energy tax.”
The Republican from Michigan drew a comparison between Democrats’ failed attempts to pass a cap-and-trade bill to reduce emissions, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s recently finalized Clean Power Plan during a hearing Wednesday.
Upton said, “the American people recognized cap-and-trade for what it was, a massive economy-wide energy tax, and Congress wisely listened to them” when the policy was being debated when Democrats held the majority. “And since that time, neither the House nor the Senate has made a serious effort to revive this discredited approach.”
A cap-and-trade system would place a hard limit on emissions, and force power plants and other emitters to buy emission credits if they need to exceed those caps.
“But now, the Obama administration is attempting to regulate where it failed to legislate with EPA issuing final rules to regulate carbon dioxide from new and existing fossil fuel-fired plants,” Upton said. Carbon dioxide is blamed by many scientists for increasing the Earth’s temperature, and increasing the rate of flooding and droughts.
Under the Clean Power Plan, EPA could impose a cap-and-trade system if a state cannot, or refuses, to comply with the program by the fall of next year. Upton says this places most “states between a rock and a hard place.”
“I didn’t support the legislative version of cap and trade, and I don’t feel any better about today’s regulatory equivalent,” he said.
