Cap and trade may be dead in the Senate, according to newly installed Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, but Republicans warn the news of its demise have been exaggerated.
Manchin told a teleconference of West Virginia reporters Monday that he had received assurances from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that cap and trade would not see the light of day in the Senate — either in the lame duck session or in the 112th Congress.
“I got his commitment that cap and trade will definitely not be on the agenda and won’t be on the agenda during the next Congress,” Manchin told reporters following his swearing in. “I have a deep commitment and a personal commitment from him that cap and trade is dead.”
Observers attribute Reid’s reluctance to pursue cap and trade to a lack of votes in the Senate and to opposition from the incoming Republican House majority. Outgoing senators who supported cap and trade, such as Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter, are being replaced in the 112th Congress by Republicans who oppose it.
“They don’t have the numbers, but the administration is working hard on imposing cap and trade through regulation,” Republican Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe told The Daily Caller.
The senator predicts Carol Browner, President Obama’s climate change czar, will circumvent Congress and use executive branch regulatory power to implement cap and trade.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) introduced a rule last May, known as the tailoring rule, which takes effect Jan. 2., targeting 70 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The regulation will affect new power plants, oil refineries and factories that contribute more than 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydroflourocarbons, perflurocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride annually, as well as existing ones that increase their emissions by 75,000 tons annually.
A report conducted by the Inhofe’s staff on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee suggests that the EPA’s looming effort to introduce cap and trade using executive power and other regulations could kill jobs and cause energy costs to skyrocket.
The report predicts the tailoring rule will hit the poor and the elderly the hardest and encourage further erosion of the nation’s manufacturing base.
Inhofe also criticized the new EPA standards for commercial and industrial boilers that he says will cost approximately 798,000 jobs, and regulations affecting Portland Cement plants he says threatens to shutter 18 factories ̶ directly endangering 1,800 jobs and indirectly endangering 9,000 others.
Opposition to the rules have been bipartisan, and 17 Democrats signed on to a Sept. 17 letter to EPA Director Lisa Jackson protesting the rules.
The committee report also anticipates severe economic ramifications from the administration’s plans to impose revised rules on ozone emissions, which the report says would put “severe restrictions on job creation.”
“The overregulation is terrible and will be accelerating I think because of a fear that Obama will not be around after 2012,” Inhofe said.
Michigan Republican Rep. Fred Upton, a candidate to chair the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, says the Obama administration will have a tough time enforcing these rules.
“If I am chairman, the underlying theme will be that we are not going to allow this administration to regulate what they have been unable to legislate,” Upton said. “Lisa Jackson is going to have her own parking spot up at the Rayburn horseshoe.
“She’s been up to our committee I think once in the past two years, but she’s going to be up on all of the garbage we’ve been hearing about ̶ whether it be on coal ash, ozone or a whole number of different issues particularly as it relates to jobs.”
Upton vows to use the power of the purse to bar the administration from funding enforcement of these rules.
“I predict that there will be enough Democratic survivors to join us, so that it will be a bipartisan effort,” Upton said. “Cap and trade, even under the current Congress, would fail today where it passed a year and a half ago.
“It would fail today by 50 votes, so you could imagine with our pickup of [over 60 seats] how popular cap and trade will be now. We even have enough votes to get to a veto override, I think if we do it right.”
Getting a bill defunding the EPA enforcement effort passed through Congress could be difficult due to Democratic control of the Senate, Inhofe said.
But the senator said possible votes against defunding the administration’s cap and trade regulatory effort on the part of at least seven vulnerable Democratic senators, such as Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. Robert Casey Jr., could make their re-elections even more difficult in 2012.
Democratic cap and trade supporters accuse Republicans of hypocrisy, noting the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations used schemes similar to cap and trade to confront acid rain and to phase out the use of lead in gasoline.
“The climate science denial of the House Republican leadership puts them at odds with the majority of the American people, including a large majority of Republicans,” said Daniel J. Weiss, senior fellow and director of climate strategy for the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “They think they are using it as a wedge issue against Democrats, but the reality is they are painting themselves outside the mainstream of scientific thought.”