The Obama administration announced today it will use the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory power to set limits on carbon dioxide emissions from factories, power plants and refineries, a decision which likely sets the stage for another partisan battle.

Incoming House Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) announced the chairs and vice chairs of the subcommittees on Thursday.

By Vicki Needham

Newly minted House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) outlined several of his priorities Wednesday, including the creation of investigative teams to examine spending issues within specific programs. 

Rogers, who will helm the panel when House Republicans take over the majority in the 112th Congress, said he intends to cut spending back to fiscal 2008 levels, pass all 12 spending bills in the House and uphold the earmark ban pushed by his party.

To root out areas to cut spending, Rogers wants to form panels of committee members to “go after a specific problem,” he said during a conference call with reporters. 

The new chairman said he had spoken with Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) on the possibility of creating an oversight subcommittee but thought the move might discourage the 12 subpanels from performing their own budgetary oversight. He’s calling on the subcommittees to be “vigorous in their oversight,” so he’s opted for the investigative panels to be formed when needed to look at specific spending issues. 

“This is a better way to get at what we both want to do,” he said. 

Finding those possible spending cuts will be crucial for spending to drop to 2008 levels — by about an estimated $100 billion. 

Although it will take time to assemble a list of possible budget cuts, Rogers suggested starting with unspent or unobligated stimulus funds or by not hiring new agents at the IRS to oversee the new healthcare law, he said. 

Democrats have said those monies will be spent or obligated by the end of the year. 

“Everything is on the table,” he said. 

Passing all 12 spending bills is another key agenda item and will help in rooting out unnecessary spending and transforming the process, he said. 

“We don’t need more omnibus bills, they are a magnet for wasteful spending,” he said. 

The spending process should be transparent and the bills will be open for amendment, “and let the chips fall where they may,” he said. 

Earmarks are another issue that could create consternation between the two chambers next year, with Democrats still controlling the Senate and many of those lawmakers voicing support for the practice. 

Rogers, who has been criticized for his earmarking prowess, said he supports and will enforce the moratorium on earmarks in the House and will strip out any earmarks contained in Senate spending bills that come his way.

“In this era there’s a true fiscal crisis, so I will forgo earmarks,” he said. 

By SIMMI AUJLA

The special committee set up by Democrats in 2007 to study energy and climate issues will disappear in the next Congress, its top Republican said Wednesday.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the ranking member of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, said that Wednesday morning’s hearing by the panel would be the last.

Sensenbrenner confirmed that Republicans will let the committee, which was established by House Democrats after they retook the majority in 2007, would fold up shop as had been rumored. 

To read the entire article:  http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/131431-republicans-cut-house-climate-panel

President Obama announced in March an ambitious plan to double U.S. exports within five years. “In a time when millions of Americans are out of work, boosting our exports is a short-term imperative,” he said.

If it is, the administration needs to rethink its economically suicidal policy with respect to coal, for which there is robust international demand.

Other nations are making a lot of money and creating a lot of jobs with the reliable, affordable fuel the administration doesn’t want Americans to use

“Coal is the fastest-growing fuel in the world and will continue to be largely driven by the enormous appetite for energy in Asia,” Vic Svec, senior vice president of Peabody Energy, told the New York Times.

“The growth and shifts in coal exports to China are impressive, flowering even during the recession,” wrote Elizabeth Rosenthal of the Times. “Seaborne trade in thermal coal rose to about 690 million tons this year, up from 385 million tons in 2001.

“The price rose to $60 from $40 a ton five years ago to a high of $200 in 2008. Coal delivered to southern China currently sells for $114 per ton.”

Yet China was a net exporter of coal until 2009. It will import as much as 150 million tons this year.

Last year, the United States exported only 2,714 tons of coal to China. That rose to 2.9 million tons in the first six months of this year, but the United States still accounts for what Rosenthal termed “a minuscule fraction” of China’s coal imports.

India is another huge market. It imported 36 million tons of coal in 2008 – and 60 million tons in 2009.

The Chinese and Indian economies are roaring. The pitiful state of the U.S. economy just cost the president much of the support he enjoyed in Congress.

And much of this damage is self-inflicted.

Other regions of the world, including Australia and South America, are supplying the demand for coal. An Australian company signed a $60 billion contract – the nation’s largest export contract ever – to supply coal to Chinese power stations starting in 2013.

Australia exported $508 million worth of coal to China in 2008 – and $5.6 billion worth last year.

Yet the administration has cast its lot with the likes of the Sierra Club, which estimates that it has helped to block 139 proposed coal-burning plants in the United States in recent years.

The administration’s war on coal robs the U.S. economy of the affordable energy it needs to recover. Further damaging the industry here will do even more damage to the U.S. balance of trade, and job creation.

Strangling the coal industry here, while other nations encourage it, won’t help the environment or the economy. It’s time U.S. policy reflected that.

The Sierra Club isn’t responsible for economic well-being. The administration is.

The agency’s regulatory onslaught has stopped new power generation.

by Wall Street Journal

President Obama is now retrenching after his midterm rebuke, and one of the main ways he’ll try to press his agenda is through the alphabet soup of the federal regulators. So a special oversight priority for the new Congress ought to be the Environmental Protection Agency, which has turned a regulatory firehose on U.S. business and the power industry in particular.

The scale of the EPA’s current assault is unprecedented, yet it has received almost no public scrutiny. Since Mr. Obama took office, the agency has proposed or finalized 29 major regulations and 172 major policy rules. This surge already outpaces the Clinton Administration’s entire first term—when the EPA had just been handed broad new powers under the 1990 revamp of air pollution laws.

Another measure of the EPA’s aggressiveness are the six major traditional pollutants that the agency polices, such as ozone or sulfur dioxide. No Administration has ever updated more than two of these rules in a single term, and each individual rule has tended to run through a 15-year cycle on average since the Clean Air Act passed in 1970. Under administrator Lisa Jackson, the EPA is stiffening the regulations for all six at the same time.

The hyperactive Ms. Jackson is also stretching legal limits to satisfy the White House’s climate-change goals, now that Senate Democrats have killed cap and trade. The EPA’s “endangerment finding” on carbon is most controversial, but other parts of her regulatory ambush may be more destructive by forcing mass retirements of the coal plants that provide half of America’s electricity.

A case study in the Jackson method is the EPA’s recent tightening of air-quality standards for sulfur dioxide. The draft SO2 rule was released for the formal period of public comment last December. Yet the final rule published in June suddenly included a “preamble” that rewrote 40-odd years of settled EPA policy.

The EPA has heretofore measured the concentration of pollutants in the ambient air by, well, measuring the concentration of pollutants in the ambient air. The preamble throws out this sampling and ultraviolet testing and substitutes computer estimations of what air quality might be. The EPA favors modelling because it can plug in the data and assumptions of its choosing, like how often a power plant is running at maximum capacity. Gaming the models will allow the agency to punish states and target individual plants, even if actual measurements show that SO2 is under the new EPA standard.

The EPA is within its legal discretion to reinterpret clean-air laws—but not without any prior warning, and the preamble surprise violates years of case law about federal rule-making. Worse, the agency hasn’t gotten around to detailing how the models should be built or how the analysis must be conducted. Without any ground rules for approval, the permits required for any major energy or construction projects can’t be issued.

The uncertainty created by the SO2 rule and similar rule-makings has resulted in a near-total freeze on EPA permits, imposing a de facto project moratorium that will last for the next 18 months at minimum. North Dakota, Texas, Louisiana, South Dakota and Nevada are already suing the EPA because of the restrictions they now face on their “ability to permit new sources or expand existing sources,” and many more states are expected to join them.

The same goes for the EPA plan to require “maximum achievable control technology” on a plant-by-plant basis to nearly every coal- or oil-fired utility in the country to limit pollutants like mercury. The EPA started writing that rule while the data that will supposedly inform its decision were still being collected. Then there’s the upcoming “boiler rule,” which the EPA’s lowball estimate says will impose $9.5 billion in new capital costs on manufacturers, paper mills, hospitals and the like. There are so many others.

The electric industry in particular is being forced to choose between continuing to operate and facing major capital expenditures to meet the increasingly strict burden, or else shutting down and building replacements that use more expensive sources like natural gas. Either way, the costs will be passed through to business and consumers as higher rates, which is the same as a tax increase. The general consensus is that as much as a third of the U.S. coal-fired fleet will be retired by 2016, costing north of $100 billion—a consensus that includes an important federal advisory agency, as we wrote last month in “The Unseen Carbon Agenda.”

Ms. Jackson responded to that editorial in a letter that waved off any criticism of her industrial policy as merely opposition to “common-sense efforts to reduce harmful pollution.” And it’s true that some of these costs might be justified if they resulted in real environmental improvements like less acid rain.

Yet return to sulfur dioxide: SO2 emissions fell by 56% between 1980 and 2008, despite a 70% increase in fossil fuel-based electric generation over the same period. With current levels so low, the EPA’s own 168-page analysis estimates that the direct benefits of the new SO2 regulations will amount to all of $12 million nationwide in 2020. Liquidating the EPA budget would yield better returns.

At least 56 Senators in next year’s Congress are on record supporting bills that would freeze the EPA’s carbon regulation for a time or strip the agency of its self-delegated powers. But the EPA is still pursuing the same agenda through other means, harming business expansion, job creation and economic growth. A key task for the next Congress will be to start pushing back.