Posted on 05/13/2015 12:21:02 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Senate Republicans introduced a bill Wednesday that would overturn the Obama administration’s landmark climate rule for power plants and make it nearly impossible to rewrite them.
The legislation represents the GOP’s first major legislative effort in the Senate to confront the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) carbon dioxide limits it proposed last year.
It reflects the Republican Party’s broad opposition to the regulations, which they say would cost billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of jobs and have little to no environmental benefit.
Republicans in both chambers have largely avoided legislation to stop the rules and instead focused their attention on court challenges to them and trying to ensure that the federal courts will overturn the regulations.
“Our bipartisan legislation would empower the states to protect families and businesses from electricity rate increases, reduced electrical reliability and other harmful effects of the president’s Clean Power Plan,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the bill’s sponsor, told reporters Wednesday
“Our bill would also require that any greenhouse gas standard set the EPA for new coal-fired power plants are able to be achieved by commercial power plants operating in the real world,” she said.
Twenty-five Republican senators, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), signed into the bill as co-sponsors, along with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).
The bill, dubbed the Affordable Reliable Energy Now Act (ARENA), would prevent the EPA from writing rules that are “significantly similar” to its current proposals unless it follows specific parameters that the bill outlines.
It sets out different standards for the two separate regulations the EPA proposed last year on newly built fossil fuel-fired power plants and existing ones. The latter regulation, which aims to cut the power sector's carbon emissions 30 percent by 2030, has been by far the most controversial.
Environmental groups immediately blasted the Republicans’ bill as an attack on clean air and the most significant effort yet to fight climate change.
But to Republicans, the bill is a necessary step toward protecting states and ratepayers from the rules.
“I’ve never seen anything quite this universally opposed,” said Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.
“This is going to go down probably as, probably, the most significant thing we will do in the Environment and Public Works Committee this year,” he said.
The legislation would immediately overturn both regulations, and prevent the EPA from reissuing them unless they take certain, specific steps.
For the existing plant rule, the EPA would have to submit to Congress reports on the rule’s effects on greenhouse gases and climate change, and would have to write individual sample compliances plans showing how each state could comply.
Still, that would not take effect until all court challenges are exhausted, and governors would be able to opt out of complying with it if they believe it would bring any of a wide range of negative impacts.
If the EPA wants to regulate new plants, it would have to develop different standards for coal and natural gas plants, and the standards must be commercially available and in use on multiple existing power plants.
That provision goes directly to Republicans’ complaints that the EPA’s proposal would mandate carbon capture technology on coal plants, which is not commercially available.
“The facts are that coal’s going to be used to supply power to the United States for many, many years,” Manchin said. If you’re going to use it, you should use it as clean as possible. And all we’ve asked for is for the federal government to be our partner and work with us.”
Manchin famously shot a climate change bill in a commercial for his 2010 campaign for Senate.
The court delay and state opt-out provisions are similar to, though stronger than, a bill the House Energy and Commerce Committee has passed. Manchin and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) sponsored legislation similar to the provisions for new plants last year.
Capito’s bill also clarifies the Clean Air Act to say that power plants whose emissions are already regulated under one provision would not be eligible for further regulation.
Some opponents of the rule believe that the Clean Air Act already says that, although there are conflicting versions of the law.
That provision of Capito’s legislation would effectively make the Obama administration’s main climate rule moot.
Green groups sharply criticized the bill.
“Senator Capito’s radical legislation reads like a polluter’s wish list, with attacks aimed directly at the heart of the Clean Air Act,” Sara Chieffo, legislative director for the League of Conservation Voters, said in a statement.
“Not only does this bill allow power plants to continue spewing unlimited amounts of carbon pollution into our air, it will prevent us from ever putting in place common sense limits,” she said.
The Sierra Club dubbed the bill the “Polluter Protection Act.”
“This reckless and dangerous attempt to allow unlimited carbon pollution is so thickly covered in the dirty fingerprints of the fossil fuel industry that it is barely legible,” John Coequyt, director of federal climate programs for the Sierra Club, said in a statement.
EPA spokeswoman Liz Purchia did not respond directly to the bill, but said that the senators’ concerns about reliability and cost are on EPA officials’ minds.
“EPA continues to work toward completing the proposed Clean Power Plan that will cut harmful carbon pollution from power plants,” she said in a statement.
“The plan will be affordable, will drive innovation and American jobs, and will demonstrate our leadership in the international community.”
The White House Office of Management and Budget is currently reviewing the EPA’s final rule for new power plants. The Obama administration plans to make both rules final in the middle of this summer.
Green = $$$$ supply and control.
Climate Denialists In Congress Acting As NASA's Kryptonite
"If you are intent on convincing people there is no climate change, then the last thing you want is NASA — with all its heroism and accuracy — telling folks climate change is real. So, faced with this dilemma, climate denialist's have come up with a clever solution: Get NASA out of climate change science.
As has been widely reported, the House Science, Space and Technology Committee recently approved a bill that would cut at least $300 million from NASA's earth-science budget. This comes after the head of the Senate committee overseeing NASA claimed the agency should stop doing earth-science and focus only on space exploration.
Both these moves are part of a broader effort to hobble American science from doing its job in exploring the planet's climate. As reported by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker:......
.....That's why, if your goal is denying the climate science NASA has been doggedly revealing for decades, you have a real problem. You must convince Americans that either (a) NASA is lying or (b) NASA has gotten the answer wrong. Both are going to be a hard sell......"
BUT
New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism
"NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.
Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.".....
Algore said that the Earth has a fever! Would he lie?
Bingo.
The EPA was created by a Republican.
It is a Federal entity that has no more business existing than the IRS or Obamacare or National Education. It is a bullying Federal tyrant in an area where States rights should prevail. Let a state live in its own industrial filth, and see how long it lasts. Let another approach the task of cleaning up after itself (industrially speaking) by way of free market innovation and desire, and see how it thrives.
The Federal government is out of hand and it is because of both Democrats and Republicans. Sad, but true.
Yea. Too bad so many people are bound and determined to keep voting for both of them ‘no matter what’.
But of course, the way to fix a problem is to keep empowering the people causing it. I mean heck, that should be OBVIOUS! Damn purists. Always ruining Utopia for the “Know Better’s” /S
At this point Finny, the lesser evils have to bull onward ‘no matter what’. They can’t admit they caused all this because they have too much invested in it. So they sell tickets on the train headed off the Bridge.
All ABOARRRRRRRRD!
In this particular case, it is the Clean Air Act, enacted by Congress in 1972.
And in this particular case, in 2007, SCOTUS ruled that CO2 was a pollutant(Massachusetts v EPA) and told EPA to regulate CO2 with the Clean Air Act.
Congress had their shot at this in 2009 when they attempted and failed to pre-empt EPA with a Cap and Trade program. The GOP could stop Obama and the EPA tomorrow by passing legislation to regulate CO2, after which the PREZ and EPA would have to implement, administer, and enforce that act of congress.
Is the prez supposed to implement, administer, and enforce unconstitutional laws that arise from Congress and the Judiciary? For example, the constitution says that if Congress passes gun control or a judicial decision somewhere creates such necessary law, the president is constitutionally obligated to use the federal government to implement, administer, and enforce it? With a new executive agency, if need be?
Something is wrong with that picture when you are voting for a Republican willing to go along with that, and Obamacare, and Global Warming EPA tyranny.
I finally figured out why there are currently TWENTY FIVE probable total Republican primary candidates with 15 declared, 10 still exploring, including Walker, Jindahl, Christie, Jeb, and Trump, for pete's sake.
This versus a Democrat party whose contemporary primary field is TEN, seven declared, 3 "exploratory."
Republicans are deeply confused.
Everyone in the leadership of the EPA should have been hanged for sedition after the Rapanos v US decision. The EPA Nazis blatantly defied the USSC and the US Congress.
Congress refused to hold hearings after Rapanos. The EPA is nothing more than Hitler’s “Blut und Bolden” (Blood and Soil) movement dusted off for the 21st century.
Big business thought they could control it. Nixon pushed it. The very first thing banned was the very useful, pro-human life chemical commonly called DDT.
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