Will Senate Showdown on Clean Air Act Slow Down EPA's Momentum?

WASHINGTON—Senators are likely in for a doozy of a debate Thursday before they vote on Lisa Murkowski’s resolution to derail the EPA’s authority to regulate heat-trapping gases under the 40-year-old Clean Air Act.

And while it is tempting to dismiss the back and forth discussion as yet another example of mere garden variety political theatrics, don’t. Better to pay attention to the nuances of the exchange.

That’s advice from Seth Kaplan, an attorney with the Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation who has specialized in climate issues for two decades.

With climate bills already on the floor, senators are setting the stage for a debate about global warming legislation, Kaplan told Solve Climate in a Monday interview. And that’s a legitimate pursuit, he continued. Where senators drift out of bounds is when they politicize the scientific proof that man-made emissions are warming the Earth.

“It’s not inherently bad to politicize things,” he explained. “Politics is how we resolve issues and govern ourselves in a democracy without hitting each other, which is hardly a bad thing."

"But we need to make a distinction between a political debate about policy and a political debate about science. When the science is politicized and we end up having a congressional vote to disapprove of what is already a scientific conclusion—that is absurd.”

Murkowski’s bipartisan legislation has 40 co-sponsors, including three Democrats. The Alaska Republican deployed what’s known as the Congressional Review Act to negotiate a debate date with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

None other than Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson has spoken out against the resolution. Linking it to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, she labeled it a big step backward that would keep America addicted to oil in an 11-paragraph opinion piece posted Monday on the Huffington Post.

“Senator Lisa Murkowski, with strong support from big oil companies and their lobbyists, has proposed a resolution that would drastically weaken our nation’s historic effort to increase fuel savings, save consumers money and cut oil consumption from American cars and trucks,” Jackson wrote.

Leaders of environmental advocacy organizations doubt the ranking Republican of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee can muster the 51 votes she needs to push the measure over to the House of Representatives, where its chances of passage are reckoned to be even slimmer. And President Obama would most likely veto any such legislation reaching his desk.

However, those same advocates comprehend why Murkowski is trying to block EPA’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases at this juncture -- a visibly muscular, nimble and able EPA, with full backing of the Obama administration, has gained much traction with its “tailoring” rule that is allowing it to apply the Clean Air Act to greenhouse gas emissions with common sense and caution. Murkowski is out to lay a speed bump to slow the agency's momentum.

“It’s ridiculous to claim that EPA is a rogue agency out to regulate the whole country,” Frank O’Donnell, the president of D.C.-based Clean Air Watch said in a Monday interview. “The agency has proceeded cautiously and has carefully tailored its laws thus far"

“These regulations are not a threat to small businesses at all,” he continued, adding that sources such as restaurants, farms and schools would be exempt. “The EPA bent over backward trying to mitigate the impact. But if EPA officials had done nothing, they would have been derelict in their duty to carry out what the Supreme Court instructed more than three years ago.”

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