The Senate and House this week are targeting President Obama’s climate agenda and Environmental Protection Agency regulations.
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Wednesday morning will hold a hearing to probe the president’s interest in reaching an international climate deal at the end of the year in Paris.
The EPA’s emission rules for existing power plants are a key piece of President Obama’s plan to secure commitments from other countries to limit their greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris deal.
The EPA climate rules, known as the Clean Power Plan, have a variety of components, in which the international component is one part. The hearing likely will explore how reaching an agreement in Paris would affect domestic policy, including the legal ramifications, according to the committee.
The Senate hearing is entitled the “Road to Paris: President Obama’s International Climate Agenda and Implications for Domestic Environmental Law.” The committee says “the purpose of the hearing is to examine the President’s Climate Action Plan with a particular focus on his international goals in the context of the ongoing international climate negotiations.”
The Climate Action Plan contains a number of regulations and executive actions the president is taking to address climate change. The plan includes the emission standards for the states that the EPA is slated to finalize later this summer to control carbon dioxide, which many scientists blame for manmade climate change. Republicans have been vehemently opposed to the new regulations as an affront to state sovereignty and an overreach of EPA’s Clean Air Act authority.
Meanwhile, a hearing in the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee on Thursday will be taking up the matter of EPA overreach in promulgating the Clean Power Plan.
The hearing, entitled “Examining EPA Regulatory Overreach,” will examine EPA’s “recent regulatory agenda, the scientific and technical justification for these regulations, and these regulations’ impacts on the American people.”
The only witness at the hearing will be EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. She will be questioned on the agency’s regulatory agenda, given that “EPA has recently proposed and finalized numerous regulations that will have significant impacts on the American people and businesses,” according to a committee memo.
The top priority of the committee is the effects of the Clean Power Plan, followed by the EPA’s proposed strict ozone rules and recently finalized Clean Water Rule. All three rules have received stiff opposition from the states. For instance, the “scope and manner in which the [Clean Power Plan] has been conceived by the agency has been met with considerable opposition from many states and other stakeholders,” the memo reads.
“Recently, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) produced a report at the request of Chairman [Lamar] Smith that found that EPA’s Clean Power Plan would force the retirement of a significant number of coal-fired power plants, increase electricity prices, and decrease American [gross domestic product],” the memo adds.
The ozone rules would offer similar challenges for the U.S. economy, according to the committee. The memo says “stakeholder groups have found that EPA’s analysis vastly underestimates the costs and believe that this rule could be the most expensive ever enacted by the agency.”
The Clean Water Rule, also known as the Waters of the U.S. rule, also will be examined for its effects on the U.S. economy and the expanded jurisdiction of the rule on waterways throughout the country. States, farmers and ranchers argue that the regulation would place EPA jurisdiction over drainage ditches and other resources not commonly referred to as waterways.
“EPA released the final rule expanding the definition of the ‘Waters of the United States’ under the Clean Water Act” in May, the memo reads. “While the agency clarified certain aspects of the rule, the final definition represents a tremendous expansion of EPA jurisdiction with regard to the Clean Water Act.”
The memo says that while “EPA’s final rule does not regulate ditches to the same extent in the proposed rule, it does clearly define Clean Water Act jurisdiction over tributaries to traditionally navigable waters, waters adjacent to jurisdictional waters …, prairie potholes and other isolated waters, as well as waters with a significant nexus within the 100-year floodplain of a traditional navigable water.”
Last week, nearly 30 states sued the EPA in a variety of federal courts over the rule being unconstitutional and a violation of states’ rights.
