To Regulate Or Not To Regulate? That Is Still the Question

While current and former EPA officials were in celebratory mode yesterday at a symposium to mark the 40th anniversary of the Clean Air Act, clean air advocates on Capitol Hill were fending off yet another attempt to undercut the landmark law.

For more than a year, we've reported on legislators' efforts to block EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, led especially by Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski (now likely a lame duck) and coal state Democrat Sen. Jay Rockefeller (W.Va).

Now, with climate legislation stalled in its tracks, the agency's independent Clean Air Act-given authority to clamp down on greenhouse gas emissions from cars, power plants and factories has become all the more crucial and—though I'm not sure this is possible— more controversial too.

On Tuesday, the next chapter of the battle unfolded: With the Senate Appropriations Committee about to debate next year's fiscal budget for EPA, Murkowski threatened to attach a provision that would handcuff the agency's climate plans. And with the tight Tea-infused election season looming, Democrats actually feared this amendment had a decent shot of passing, and therefore postponed debate for EPA and the Interior Department's budgets for a later date. At the same time, Sen. Rockefeller keeps shilling his bill that would delay any regulations for 2 more years (because 10 years is not enough to time to pass a climate bill); Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has promised him a vote at some point this fall.

Politics is politics, as always, and I can't say much about whether these cynical, anti-science plans will be successful (though if they head anywhere but a dead end, this is hugely bad news). But reality is also reality: climate change is happening, carbon dioxide is a pollutant that harms our health, and the Clean Air Act, at least for the time being, happens to be the most practical way to limit those emissions. Industry lobbyists say the economy will pay dearly, but history (again that persnickety reality creeping in) has nearly always proven these claims untrue.

Take a look at the history of the Clean Air Act. As EPA pointed out yesterday, this one piece of legislation avoided an estimated 205,000 premature deaths, 672,000 cases of chronic bronchitis, 843,000 asthma attacks, and 10.4 million lost IQ points—and that's just in its first 20 years, from 1970 to 1990.  “Say what you want about E.P.A.’s business sense,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told an audience yesterday, “but we certainly know how to get a return on our investment," according to The New York Times.

Every step of the way, lobbyists have claimed the law would kill jobs and cost billions, but every time these predictions have not come to pass. Plus, isn't the point of environmental legislation to help society, not just special interests? Every $1 in Clean Air Act compliance costs has returned $40 in health and environmental savings (think of the health care costs associated with 843,000 asthma attacks).

Naysayers object that greenhouse gas pollutants are somehow different than conventional ones like sulfur dioxide, for which even the dreaded cap-and-trade system has already worked wonders. I agree—of course, CO2 is different; Carbon is the very substance of our fossil fuels, not just the impurity. And the technologies to capture these emissions at smokestacks aren't quite there yet. But that doesn't mean nothing should be done. There are easy steps the industry can take now to reduce emissions, such as improving efficiency, and the EPA can promote those. Later, when steeper emissions cuts are needed, the technological and hopefully policy options will catch up.

As history has proven, the costs of the Clean Air Act are never as great as we're told. That it's even still a question that EPA should move forward is based in pure politics, not reality. Please sign this petition to tell your Senator to protect the Clean Air Act and preserve EPA's authority to take action on climate change.

Photo credit: Steve Isaacs via Flickr

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