Kentucky Coal Blog

The battle surrounding the Obama administration’s efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions opened a new front late last week when the US Chamber of Commerce made good on its threat to launch a legal challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s right to impose rules that limit carbon emissions.

The group said on Friday that is has filed a petition to challenge the EPA’s decision that it is allowed to regulate carbon emissions under the existing Clean Air Act. The legal challenge will allege the EPA lapsed from the correct processes when reaching the “endangerment finding” that ruled greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health, and as a result can be legislated under the Clean Air Act.

The EPA’s ruling prompted fierce criticism from Republicans and a number of business groups, including the US Chamber of Commerce, which controversially vowed to fight the ruling, prompting a number of pro-regulation firms such as Apple and Pacific Gas and Electric to quit the trade association.

The Chamber has subsequently ditched its earlier calls for a series of public hearings on climate science similar to the Scopes Trial that examined the theory of evolution in the 1920s, but maintains the EPA should not be able to impose rules to cut emissions from vehicles and power plants.

Steven J. Law, chief legal officer and general counsel of the US Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement that the legal challenge “will focus specifically on the inadequacies of the process that EPA followed in triggering Clean Air Act regulation, and not on scientific issues related to climate change or endangerment”.

The EPA has long maintained that it carried out a lengthy and comprehensive review before ruling that the impacts from climate change would pose a threat to human health, and is expected to fight the suit.

Environmental groups have also accused the Chamber of Commerce of acting on behalf of carbon intensive industries to delay efforts to tackle climate change that could impose new costs on their businesses.

However, Law said the Chamber “strongly supports efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere”, but maintains that the Clean Air Act is an ineffective means of doing so.

“The wrong way [to curb emissions] is through the EPA’s endangerment finding, which triggers Clean Air Act regulation,” he said. “Because of the huge potential impact on jobs and local economies, this is an issue that requires careful analysis of all available data and options. Unfortunately, the agency failed to do that and instead overreached. The result is a flawed administrative finding that will lead to other poorly conceived regulations further downstream. “

Acting as the “bad cop” in the Obama administration’s unprecedented move to put the entire nation under an internationally mandated regime, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has promulgated a so-called “Endangerment Finding” that carbon dioxide is a pollutant harmful to humans and the environment. The resulting regulatory mandates, reported to be more than 600 pages long, will stagger the imagination and cripple American commerce and industry.

The “good cop,” by the way, is the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade (read, cap-and-tax) bill and its kindred making their way through Congress. If you don’t like cap and trade, so goes the cynical strategy of the administration, then you’ll really hate the EPA.

Enter the courts. Southeastern Legal Foundation, which has never shied away from controversial constitutional matters (the 2000 census, McCain-Feingold and President Clinton’s law license), has filed both a Petition for Reconsideration with the EPA and, this week, a Petition for Judicial Review with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, challenging EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s effort to “regulate” carbon dioxide as a “pollutant” under the Clean Air Act.

More than a dozen U.S. representatives and nearly two dozen associations and companies represented by our group share the view that the EPA failed to properly consider relevant science before making its Endangerment Finding. The group will argue that the EPA’s reliance on flawed and questionable science was arbitrary and capricious and that the administrator did not exercise proper and independent judgment in making the Endangerment Finding.

What American taxpayers, consumers and employers are facing is a threatening combination of interests that want a new carbon regime. There are many vested interests hoping to reap the profits of doom. Scientists need grants; when they make a loud enough noise, they get those grants — and in the case of global warming, there are billions of dollars at stake.

What American taxpayers, consumers and employers are facing is a threatening combination of interests that want a new carbon regime. There are many vested interests hoping to reap the profits of doom. Scientists need grants; when they make a loud enough noise, they get those grants — and in the case of global warming, there are billions of dollars at stake.

Grant-seeking scientists combine with loud cries for “climate justice” coming from many developing nations. Recent Copenhagen pronouncements by nations like Sudan, essentially demanding “cash for warming” extortion dollars from the developed nations, make clear that global interests (read, the United Nations) see the U.S. as a piggy bank.

Finally, the pro-global warming camp rounds out with various financial institutions, some with ties to Al Gore, that stand to make billions in so-called “carbon trading” between “polluters” and those with carbon “credits.”

But the science is ultimately what should carry the day for public policy on climate change. With huge vested interests pursuing a globalist agenda, it’s been a Galileo-like effort to make the “skeptic” view known to the American people. Yet we are winning.

Though about $300 million is being spent to promote global warming alarmism, less than half the American people still believe it. This continues a decadelong trend of rising public skepticism as the fraudulent claims that the science was “settled” have disintegrated.

Thankfully, common sense and outrage are not the only checks available against overreaching government power. Even a formidable bureaucracy like the EPA must abide by the law, and its decisions must bear a rational relation to the evidence.

Ultimately, it is the courts that provide the final check and balance to curtail the irrational excesses of the legislative and executive branches. Can the courts restrain the anti-scientific juggernaut exemplified by the EPA’s “Endangerment Finding”? That is the trillion-dollar question.

Shannon L. Goessling is executive director and chief legal counsel for Southeastern Legal Foundation.

By Jeanne Cummings

Defying conventional wisdom that a hardened partisan divide and looming midterm elections will prevent the type of compromises necessary for big reforms, business leaders and environmentalists are redoubling their efforts to advance an energy and climate bill in the Senate.

It’s a seemingly improbable goal, but upending that way of thinking is one of the objectives of a Capitol Hill lobbying blitz launched last week by executives from nearly 200 large and small companies. A dozen CEOs — including Shell Oil’s Marvin Odum, Duke Energy’s Jim Rogers and NRG Energy’s David Crane — are scheduled to meet with lawmakers and administration officials Tuesday.

“Comprehensive climate change legislation is not part of the liberal agenda,” said Crane, whose company operates a wide range of energy facilities that run from wind to coal to nuclear. “It’s a decidedly centrist thing. We reduce carbon emissions, and we reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Both parts of the political spectrum should come together on that.”

 “Any capitalist with a pulse knows China is moving forward,” said Tad Segal, a spokesman for U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of business and environmental groups that favor reform. “We can solve a crisis at the same time we grow jobs.”

 Another business coalition, called We Can Lead, which includes a mix of pro-reform businesses, is taking the campaign to the public by running television and print ads urging Congress to “move swiftly and boldly” and pass legislation.

 The intensive lobbying effort comes at a time when the so-called tripartisan team of Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) is working to develop a bill that can pass.

 In addition, the White House is working aggressively to demonstrate its willingness to make significant compromises to get a bill passed.

“We’re going to need more than Lindsey Graham,” Carol Browner, who is overseeing the legislative effort at the White House, told POLITICO. “He’s very cognizant of that, as are we. As we demonstrate that we are being pragmatic and open to thinking about all of the energy solutions, that will be important to some Republicans.”

Nowhere has the White House shifted its stance more clearly than in the area of nuclear energy — a topic President Barack Obama didn’t even mention in his first address to Congress last year, outlining his administration’s goals.

In addition to blessing an expansion of nuclear energy in his State of the Union speech last month, the president’s budget calls for increasing Department of Energy loan guarantee authority for nuclear construction projects by $36 billion, to a total of about $55 billion.

Obama also has instructed Energy Secretary Steven Chu to create a commission to study and provide new recommendations about how to manage nuclear fuel and waste — an issue that has bedeviled the industry and tied up Congress.

A strong nuclear plank in a comprehensive bill is critical to Graham and could be a lure for other Republicans, such as Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, who is a longtime nuclear advocate.

 Crane, who noted that Obama’s public embrace of nuclear industry was the top water-cooler topic inside the industry the day after his speech, said one mission of the business leaders lobbying Congress is to “see if we can help expand the Lindsey Graham circle. That’s what we are going to try to do.”

 Lieberman has taken the lead in drafting a nuclear plank for a comprehensive bill. But it’s unclear whether any other parts of the legislation are even in the drafting stages.