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White House rejects regulating greenhouse gases
By DINA CAPPIELLO,
AP
Posted: 2008-07-11 23:28:47
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration, dismissing the
recommendations of its top experts, rejected regulating the greenhouse
gases blamed for global warming Friday, saying it would cripple the
U.S. economy.

In a 588-page federal notice, the Environmental Protection Agency made
no finding on whether global warming poses a threat to people's health
or welfare, reversing an earlier conclusion at the insistence of the
White House and officially kicking any decision on a solution to the
next president and Congress.

The White House on Thursday rejected the EPA's suggestion three weeks
earlier that the 1970 Clean Air Act can be both workable and effective
for addressing global climate change. The EPA said Friday that law is
"ill-suited" for dealing with global warming.

"If our nation is truly serious about regulating greenhouse gases, the
Clean Air Act is the wrong tool for the job," EPA Administrator
Stephen Johnson told reporters. "It is really at the feet of
Congress."

White House press secretary Dana Perino said that President Bush is
committed to further reductions but that there is a "right way and a
wrong way to deal with climate change."

The wrong way is "to sharply increase gasoline prices, home heating
bills and the cost of energy for American businesses," she said. "The
right way, as the president has proposed, is to invest in new
technologies."

At the just concluded G-8 summit at Toyako, Japan, Bush and other
world leaders called for a voluntary 50 percent reduction in
greenhouse gases worldwide by 2050 but offered no specifics on how to
do it.

In a setback for Bush, the Supreme Court ruled last year that the
government had the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate
greenhouse gases as a pollutant. Bush has consistently opposed doing
that.

Congress hasn't found the will to do much about the problem either.
Supporters of regulating greenhouse gases could get only 48 votes in
the 100-member Senate last month. The House has held several hearings
on the problem but no votes on any bill addressing it. Both major
presidential candidates, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack
Obama, have endorsed variations of the approach rejected by the
Senate.

In its voluminous document, the EPA laid out a buffet of options on
how to reduce greenhouse gases from cars, ships, trains, power plants,
factories and refineries. On Friday, Johnson called the proposals
drafted by his staff as "putting a square peg into a round hole" and
he said moving forward would be irresponsible.

"One point is clear: The potential regulation of greenhouse gases
under any portion of the Clean Air Act could result in unprecedented
expansion of EPA authority that would have a profound effect on
virtually every sector of the economy and touch every household in the
land," Johnson wrote in the document's preface Friday.

Attorneys general from several states called the administration's
findings inadequate.

"While we appreciate the effort that EPA staff made in putting
together today's documents, the time has long passed for open-ended
pondering - what we need now is action," said Attorney General Martha
Coakley of Massachusetts, which initiated the Supreme Court case.

The EPA said it had encountered resistance from the Agriculture,
Commerce, Energy and Transportation departments, as well as the White
House, that made it "impossible" to respond in a timely fashion to the
Supreme Court decision.

"Our agencies have serious concerns with this suggestion because it
does not fairly recognize the enormous - and, we believe,
insurmountable - burdens, difficulties, and costs, and likely limited
benefits, of using the Clean Air Act" to regulate greenhouse gas
emissions, the secretaries of the four agencies wrote to the White
House on Wednesday.

Discussing the benefits from reducing greenhouse gases, the EPA said
doing nothing more than increasing fuel efficiency standards under
last year's energy bill will reduce the harmful effects of global
warming by $340 billion to $830 billion over the next three decades.

In a May draft of Friday's notice, the EPA had put the benefits to
society of further reducing greenhouse gases at $2 trillion.

Friday's action caps months of often tense negotiations between EPA
scientists and the White House over how to address global warming
under the major federal air pollution law. It ended with the White
House and other agencies citing "extraordinary circumstances" and
refusing to review the draft forwarded in June by EPA scientists.

The document released Friday is much more cautious than a
determination made in December by the agency that found greenhouse
gases endangered welfare, and it also appears to counteract findings
of drafts released in May and June that found the Clean Air Act could
be an effective tool for reducing greenhouse gases.

"EPA's approach to this has been completely thrown out by the White
House, which is only attempting to stall any kind of cleanup," said
Frank O'Donnell," president of Clean Air Watch, an environmental
advocacy group. "It sounds like the Bush administration is trying to
ignore the Supreme Court and to pretend it doesn't exist."

Rep. Edward Markey, chairman of the House Select Committee on Global
Warming, called the administration's findings "the bureaucratic
equivalent of saying that the dog ate your homework."

"The White House has taken an earnest attempt by their own climate
experts to respond to the Supreme Court's mandate to address global
warming pollution and turned it into a Frankenstein's monster," said
Markey, D-Mass.

Industry groups still expressed concern Friday over some of the
suggestions included in the document, which will be the basis for a
future action rule under a new president more inclined to take tougher
action to address global warming.

"Our point on this is that EPA has set forth a road map which
literally throws the entire way which we manage the environment and
economy in complete turmoil," said Bill Kovacs, vice president of the
Environment, Technology and Regulatory Affairs Division at the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce.

On the Net:

EPA Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: http://www.epa.gov/epahome/pdf/anpr20080711.pdf

EPA Fact Sheet: http://www.epa.gov/epahome/anprfs.htm

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