By Robert M. Sussman, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American
Progress Action Fund and former Deputy Administrator of the
Environmental Protection Agency, for the Wonk Room.
The Wall Street Journal’s
opinion piece, The Carbon
Ultimatum,
accuses Barack Obama of planning to unleash the bureaucracy of the
Environmental Protection Agency in an effort to “bludgeon” Congress into
enacting climate change legislation:
He plans to issue an ultimatum to Congress: Either impose new taxes
and limits on carbon that he finds amenable, or the EPA carbon police
will be let loose to ravage the countryside.
To support this charge, the Journal points to recent comments by Jason
Grumet, an Obama energy advisor: “The EPA is
obligated to move
forward
in the absence of Congressional action. If there’s no action by Congress
in those 18 months, I think any responsible president would want to have
the regulatory approach.’‘
This opinion piece, which uses the time-honored ploy of opponents of
environmental
progress
of demonizing the EPA and ascribing sinister
motives to its political overseers, has two fatal flaws. One, the
specter of bureaucrats running amok and strangling the economy – by
intruding into small businesses and individual households and banning
fuels on which millions of Americans depend – is a fantasy of die-hard
free-market zealots. In fact, a new administration could enforce new
global warming
regulations
with common sense, focusing on large emitters of greenhouse gases to
achieve reasonable reductions while spurring trillions of
dollars
worth of economic
growth
and green-collar
jobs.
Second, in its zeal to accuse the EPA
workforce of a naked power grab, the Journal ignores the central reason
why EPA is part of the climate equation, as
even the conservative law professor Jonathan Adler
recognizes:
The problem with the WSJ’s narrative is that
Grumet is describing nothing more than what is legally required as a
consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA.
Under that decision, the EPA is effectively
obligated to begin the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under
the Clean Air Act. If the law is not amended, and the next
Administration fails to act, environmentalist groups will file suit to
force their hand – and win.
The Court’s
decision
came after years of evading climate change by the Bush Administration
despite the mounting evidence of rising temperatures and their
consequences for our ecosystems and economy. Unfortunately, the
EPA remains in default on its fundamental
legal responsibilities. EPA’s July Advance
Notice of Proposed
Rulemaking –
which the Journal describes as as a “roadmap” for blanketing the US
economy with onerous regulation – was in fact a further Bush delay.
Instead of a scientific “endangerment” analysis, the White House
directed EPA to prepare a neutral and
non-committal discussion of its legal authority – a stick in the eye of
the Supreme Court. They then went further by taking the unprecedented
step of belittling and disowning EPA’s
technical and legal
analysis
to score points with its allies in industry and the Republican base.
If anything, allowing EPA to move ahead under
the Clean Air Act would be “non-political” because it would honor the
terms of a Supreme Court ruling that the outgoing Administration has
chosen to defy. How simple respect for the nation’s highest court and
the law of the land equates to issuing an “ultimatum” to Congress is
baffling.