I was the second witness yesterday morning as the EPA opened its hearing process on Clean Air Act regulation of greenhouse pollutants. The first was from the American Petroleum Institute (API). He made one point over and over: the EPA shouldn't use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide and other climate pollutants; it should wait for Congress to act. Of course, just across the Potomac River, on Capitol Hill, API lobbyists were fanning out even as he spoke, telling Senators just why it would be a really terrible idea to enact the Kerry-Boxer climate bill, which would do precisely what the API is telling the EPA it favors.
This all reminds me of the old adage, "don't tax me, don't tax thee, tax the guy behind the tree." Big Carbon is fighting for its life and seems determined to do as much damage as it can before it faces the inevitable. The world will move on to a clean-energy, post-coal-and-oil economy. But these last-ditch efforts are hugely damaging, because although the EPA is moving to regulate climate pollution, the API has made it clear that those regulations will be challenged in court, resisted in Congress, and contested in next year's mid-term elections.
My own message to the EPA was much simpler: It's good that the agency is keeping a major presidential campaign promise to use the Clean Air Act to regulate big power plants, refineries, and other emitters of carbon pollution -- even if the president who made that promise is no longer in office. (Yes, it was George Bush who, back in 2000, ran on a platform of cleaning up carbon pollution using EPA regulatory authority. Undoing that promise was the first of Dick Cheney's unacknowledged coups during the Bush years.)
I also pointed out that, for those who want certainty for business, the Clean Air Act has a lot of advantages: the operators of a power plant know what emission standard they must meet, what equipment or technology or fuel will enable them to meet it, and by when they must comply. And citizens benefit by knowing that, if government fails to enforce the rules, health and environmental organizations can act on their own. All in all, it's a very powerful cleanup tool.
Which may be why the American Petroleum Institute is so afraid of it.