Hide and sneak

White House disses Supreme Court, kills $2 trillion savings

Posted by Joseph Romm (Guest Contributor) at 4:28 AM on 02 Jul 2008

Read more about: politics | White House | US EPA | legislation | greenhouse-gas emissions

The following post is by Earl Killian, guest blogger at Climate Progress.

The Wall Street Journal published new material ($ub. req'd) on the White House's emasculation of last year's Supreme Court global warming decision: The court told the EPA that the Clean Air Act requires it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The White House seeks to nullify that decision by stuffing the EPA document down a memory hole and substituting antithetical language. The WSJ has seen the EPA's draft document and reports:

The draft ... outlines how the government, under the Clean Air Act, could regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from mobile sources such as cars, trucks, trains, planes and boats, and from stationary sources such as power stations, chemical plants and refineries. The document is based on a multimillion-dollar study conducted over two years.

The White House's Office of Management and Budget has asked the EPA to delete sections of the document that say such emissions endanger public welfare, say how those gases could be regulated, and show an analysis of the cost of regulating greenhouse gases in the U.S. and other countries.

The OMB instead wants the document to show that the Clean Air Act is flawed and that greenhouse-gas regulations should be developed under new legislation, several people close to the matter said. The EPA needs to clear a final draft with the White House in order to release the document.

"This is a collision course between the agency and the OMB," said one person familiar with the document. The OMB "had in mind to lay out a different story that the Clean Air Act is broken and can't be used to regulate emissions." The Clean Air Act was originally enacted in 1970 to clean up air pollution and was amended in 1990.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that the Clean Air Act can and should be used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. It ordered the EPA to assess whether GHG emissions endanger public health and welfare. The EPA draft found they did. By deleting that finding and instead asserting that Congress should pass new legislation, the White House is delaying.

The WSJ reported that the EPA draft found that "the net benefit to society could be in excess of $2 trillion."

America and the world deserve to see the original EPA document, not a Ministry of Truth rewrite.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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6 Comments | Post a Comment

How do rich and famous people get away with.....

...personally and socially irresponsible behavior?

As everyone knows but few openly discuss, wealth and power buy freedom. What is all too obvious but often cloaked in silence is this: People with great wealth and power do not assume the responsibilities that necessarily come with freedom.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php

by stevenearlsalmony at 4:55 AM on 02 Jul 2008

Dr. Bush, Psychologist

George Bush is the medicine of sanity this country has needed for decades.

WSJ: Global Warming as Mass Neurosis
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB121486841811817591. ...

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.
What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA's Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of "99% confidence").

by jabailo at 7:53 AM on 02 Jul 2008

What the Supreme Court Actually Said

I'm as disgusted with the White House's actions as the next guy, if not more so, but lets be clear about what the Supreme Court in fact ruled. It did not tell the EPA "that the Clean Air Act requires it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions." It simply said that EPA's excuse for not doing so (claiming they didn't have the authority, that CO2 is not a "pollutant," and that GHG regulation would interfere with foreign policy objectives) was horse sh*t. In slightly kinder language but the point came across loud and clear.

So it was still up to EPA to decide whether or not to regulate, but they had to base the decision on an endangerment finding (because that's the CAA standard), not on some arbitrary nonsense like foreign policy.

Still, since the regulate-or-not-regulate ruling has to be based on the endangerment finding, if EPA comes out with an emaciated document that proposes not to regulate, without backing it up with scientific analysis that GHG do NOT endanger the public (which they can't because all the analysis did find endangerment), its hard to see how that would be in compliance with the Supreme Court mandate. Honestly part of me wishes Bush had a longer term so that this could go back to Court. I think it would be one of the strongest worded denunciations of executive overreaching from the Supreme Court, and would likely set a useful precedent against political meddling in agency decisions.

-Max Epstein

by Max8806 at 8:18 AM on 02 Jul 2008

Oy vey...

Oh, j, you've done it again.

The mellotron is your friend.

by archigeek at 8:48 AM on 02 Jul 2008

U.S. Money

Please read this about the $165 billion the US gov is giving for war spending. This is a list of BETTER uses for the money.

http://www.newsone.com/blogs/casey-gane-mccalla/

by dollhouse at 8:57 AM on 02 Jul 2008

The OMB

Great point Max that the Supremes found that EPA had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases but did not create a mandate to regulate them.

But since the Republican Revolution that started about 1994, the OMB has had tremendous influence on all kinds of agency regulations and actions, insisting on "cost-benefit" analyses that are biases to a conservative (read: Republican) methodology.

So 14 years later, it is still the same OMB where "good rules go to die." -sam

Onward through the fog

by Sam Wells at 11:07 AM on 02 Jul 2008

ADVERTISING POLICY

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