WAXMAN: ‘NO HOPE’ FOR CLIMATE LEGISLATION IN CURRENT CONGRESS

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
7/26/13

The top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee said late last week that he does not think President Barack Obama’s recently-announced climate plan will reignite a serious discussion about pricing carbon on Capitol Hill. Instead, Ranking Member Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said there “no hope” for such legislation in the current Congress during an interview that aired on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” last weekend. “The Republicans who run [the House Energy and Commerce] Committee deny the science, so there’s no hope for legislation,” said Waxman, who was the architect of landmark cap-and-trade legislation that narrowly passed the House but faltered in the Senate in 2009. “What we’ll get is action by the President under existing law and that will get us to the promise that he made on behalf of our country at the Copenhagen international conference that we’ll reduce carbon emissions 17 percent by 2020.”

Obama unveiled the sweeping, yet controversial, climate plan late last month during a speech at Georgetown University. The main pillar of the plan is a set of new carbon standards for future and existing power plans, which will be promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency in the coming years using executive authority under the Clean Air Act. The plan also authorizes the Department of Energy to dole out $8 billion in loan guarantees for advanced fossil energy projects, lease new renewable energy projects on public lands and spearhead more energy efficiency measures. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have vowed to stymie the plan via the appropriations cycle, and the FY 2014 House Interior-Environment appropriations bill advanced this week has acted as a GOP response to the President’s climate plan by slashing Environmental Protection Agency funding and barring the agency from promulgating carbon standards for new and existing plants.

Waxman said the carbon standards would be beneficial because they would force emitters to accelerate efforts develop technologies to limit emissions, as the Clean Air Act has done in the past with control technologies for other pollutants. “When we set some standards for the amount of pollution coming out of the coal burning power plants, then the coal industry and the utilities are going to have to either switch or develop the technology to limit the amount of pollution [they emit],” he said. “That will drive technology. It will improve the American economy. Businesses have been created and developed around new technologies in all the years we’ve had since the Clean Air Act was adopted in 1970.”