EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson seems unable
to step foot on Capitol Hill to talk about his 2008 budget without
getting a ton of questions about California’s waiver denial and
EPA’s much-delayed response to Massachusetts
v. EPA. Today’s NY Times carries an
editorial
explaining how the two are linked, citing and drawing out Georgetown
Professor Lisa Heinzerling’s
observation
that EPA’s waiver denial may have
inadvertently committed it to an endangerment finding)
The barrage of questions continued yesterday, courtesy of Senator Dianne
Feinstein (D-CA) and her Appropriations subcommittee. Hill Heat
live-blogged
the hearing and revealed that Johnson isn’t just personally overwhelmed
by all the legal pressure and questioning—he’s explicitly citing it
to justify his delayed reaction to the Supreme Court’s remand. To wit,
Johnson repeated the claim—previously made when he announced to a House
subcommittee that he’d be “taking a step back” from the enandgerment
finding to weigh industry’s
“concerns”—that
his delay is partly justified by a series of petitions and appeals that
California and environmental groups have filed in the last several
months, seeking the regulation of CO2
emissions from ships, aircraft, off-road vehicles, and new coal-burning
power plants under federal jurisdiction.
Each of these actions was largely motivated by
EPA’s delay in making an endangerment ruling,
and each covers areas that would be affected by such a determination.
In other words, Johnson is claiming that in order to respond to legal
maneuvers motivated by his hesitancy to act…he must delay action even
longer. While this deflection doesn’t carry any legal consequences,
another part of Johnson’s insistence that this decision requires an
expansive amount of time—perhaps until the end of the Bush
administration, as
advised by
the Heritage Foundation, which also takes credit for inspiring Johnson’s
rationale—actually highlights the imminent possibility of yet
another lawsuit against EPA.
At issue: Johnson flat-out refused to set a target date yesterday for
completing the decision-making process, and would not answer whether any
of his staff was even working on the enandgerment evaluation (as opposed
to a “myriad of issues” that they are tackling). The latter answer led
Senator Feinstein to argue, based on what she’d evidently been hearing
from other sources, that no one other than Johnson himself is weighing
the issue.
The legal coalition responsible for initiating Mass. v. EPA will
likely beg to differ with this exhaustive process, having notified the
Administrator last month that it was prepared to sue over unreasonable
delay if Johnson didn’t provide a firm target date by February 27—last
Wednesday. Stay tuned…