The House Energy and Commerce Committee is set to advance two resolutions to block the Clean Power Plan after the White House announced President Obama would veto similar measures in the Senate.
The committee took opening statements Tuesday on two resolutions that would block greenhouse gas emissions limits on new and existing power plants. The Republican-dominated panel is expected to pass the resolutions and send them to the full House at a meeting Wednesday morning.
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Using the Congressional Review Act, the resolutions would be a mostly symbolic measure to stop Obama’s signature environmental regulation. The White House announced Tuesday afternoon Obama would veto Senate resolutions aiming to do the same thing, and it’s unlikely either chamber would muster the two-thirds vote needed to override a veto.
Still, many on the committee, such as Rep. Bob Latta, R-Ohio, believe the resolution would show the American people do not support the plan.
“It is the will of the Congress and the American people that the president’s climate change agenda must be stopped,” Latta said.
The Clean Power Plan sets goals for greenhouse gas emissions reductions from states on existing power plants and is widely viewed as Obama’s top commitment to stopping climate change for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change. The conference will start Nov. 30 in Paris and run through Dec. 11.
Power plants make up about a third of the country’s carbon emissions. Many scientists blame the burning of fossil fuels, and the subsequent release of carbon, for causing climate change and the warming of the planet.
More than half the states and a number of industry groups have filed lawsuits to challenge the Clean Power Plan in court.
Obama wants to put an emphasis on climate change policies during the final year of his term, much to the chagrin of congressional Republicans.
Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said Republican members of his committee have long worked against Obama’s environmental regulations for fear of the impact they would have on energy prices. He compared the Clean Power Plan to the cap-and-trade legislation shot down by a Democrat-controlled Congress in 2010 and said the same must happen now.
“EPA’s rules seek to change fundamentally the way we generate, distribute and consume electricity across the country,” he said. “These resolutions are ultimately about protecting hard-working people from higher electricity prices, threats to grid reliability and EPA’s economy-wide energy tax.”
Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., called the resolutions transparently partisan because they have little chance of stopping the regulation.
Pallone said the Clean Air Act, which the Obama administration uses as the legal justification for the regulations, has not hurt the American economy. He pointed to the growth of the economy that has taken place since the Clean Air Act was passed and said Republicans who attack the regulations based on the economic merit will be proven wrong.
“They’ve been wrong every time, and I expect the House Republicans will use identical rhetoric today,” he said.
But that legal justification is not without some holes, said Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky.
Whitfield, the primary sponsor of the resolutions, said the EPA overturned 30 years of its own legal interpretation of the Clean Air Act to justify the Clean Power Plan.
Congress could strike the section of the Clean Air Act justifying the regulation, passed in the early 1990s, from the U.S. Code if lawmakers approve a bill in the House.
The resolutions would bring some “common sense” to Obama’s climate change policies, Whitfield said.
“These rules are going to have a dramatic impact on the pocketbook of the most vulnerable in our society,” he said.
