As expected, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finally issued its “endangerment finding” on carbon dioxide. Everyone has known for months that the EPA would be issuing the ruling.
It was prompted by a 2007 Supreme Court decision that found that greenhouse gases are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act. Since the Obama administration took power, it was only a matter of time when the EPA would act to comply with the Supreme Court ruling. Certainly doing it before Copenhagen, as my colleague Mike Signer pointed out, hands President Obama a big stick as he prepares to attend the summit next week.
Just as expected was the reaction of certain industry actors to the EPA’s move. The EPA finding “could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project,” said U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue.
Donohue’s right that the EPA ruling could lead to command-and-control regulation of carbon emissions. Which leads one to ask – why has the Chamber of Commerce been stonewalling against cap-and-trade legislation? Knowing that the EPA would have to act on emissions, why did the Chamber and other industry players sit out the cap-and-trade process?
Cap-and-trade is a far more flexible process by which the economy can curb carbon emissions. Moreover, it’s a process that’s been open to industry stakeholders – note the gnashing of teeth over the giveaways in the Waxman-Markey bill. Even EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson yesterday said that legislation is still the best way to confront the challenge of climate change.
Yet despite all that and the looming threat of the EPA ruling, the Chamber of Commerce and other industry rejectionists have refused to come and sit at the table to discuss cap-and-trade. And something tells me that even with the EPA finding, the Chamber is still not going to be joining the discussion on cap-and-trade. Instead, they’ll resort to the one thing we know for certain we’ll see in this process: lawsuits.