In Senate climate vote, Mo senators to cancel one another out
WASHINGTON — Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond is for it. Sen. Claire McCaskill is against it. The White House is threatening a veto if it passes.
Get ready for the first big climate change vote in Congress in a year, a tally that will reflect the sense of Washington about energy policy in light of the oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.
The matter at stake is an effort by Senate Republicans — and an as-yet undetermined number of Democrats — to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding” for greenhouse gases. The EPA decision sets the stage for regulating carbon pollution from utilities and other coal-burning industries without broader legislation.
A vote in the Senate is set for Thursday to invoke the rarely used Congressional Review Act in a resolution sponsored by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.
This afternoon, Bond, R-Mo., joined Murkowski and ten other Republican senators in a show of support for the resolution. The GOPers pillored the EPA repeatedly as “unelected bureaucrats” overstepping authority.
“Like all Midwestern states, Missouri doesn’t want to see the burden that this EPA takeover of carbon regulations would essentially impose on familes,” Bond said at a news conference in the Capitol.
Bond asserted that the pollution limits EPA envisions “would have no appreciable impact” on global warming given the likelihood that greenhouse gas emissions from China and India will continue to grow. He added that he has discussed pollution control with leaders in those two countries during his travels.
“When I bring up the prospect of them capping carbon emissions, they laugh at me,” Bond said. “They have hundreds of millions of people in abject poverty and they know the only way they are going to get them out is to continue to use more fossil fuels, especially coal.”
McCaskill, D-Mo., who has been cool to broader climate legislation, was dogged by environmental advocates in meetings during Congress’s Memorial Day recess. In a statement to Political Fix this afternoon, she said that she is ”sympathetic” to Murkowski’s concerns but intends to vote against the curb on EPA authority because it would eliminate the environmental agency’s ability to regulate emissions from cars and trucks.
“The government and the auto industry have agreed to set these new standards for vehicle emissions and it would be a mistake to jeopardize this historic agreement which will reduce our dependence on oil by 1.8 million barrels,” she said in the statement.
Instead of stopping the EPA rules, McCaskill said she is working with other Democrats to delay them for two years to “give Congress time to figure out how we can reduce emissions without burdening consumers and small businesses in Missouri …”
The White House this afternoon also referred to those fuel economy standards in issuing a veto threat in the event Murkowski’s resolution passes the Senate and survives an uphill climb in the House.
The White House also invoked the Gulf oil spill — like senators will be doing Thursday — by warning that the resolution “would undermine the administration’s efforts to reduce the negative impacts of pollutions and the risks associated with environmental catastrophes, like the ongoing BP oil spill.”
Two bits of background here:
First, the only other time the Congressional Review Act has come into play was nine years ago when the GOP-held Congress overturned the Clinton’s administration’s efforts to impose workplace ergonomics.
Secondly, the EPA endangerment finding was issued following an often overlooked U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2007 that sided with climate scientists and ordered the Bush administration’s EPA to explain why it had refused to regulate greenhouse gases.
-Bill Lambrecht
