An effort to keep EPA authority

By Geoff Koss April 4, 2011. Congress.org

California Democrat Barbara Boxer tugged hard at the heartstrings last week, when she took to the Senate floor to defend the EPA’s efforts to reduce emissions of the pollutants that are warming the earth.

Pointing to oversized posters of young children wearing breathing masks and using asthma inhalers, she argued that legislative efforts to strip the agency of its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to public health.

“This is what is happening in this country because of the polluters who will not clean up their mess,” Boxer said, gesturing to one of the placards. “Here is another beautiful child. We all love children. How many speeches have we had on this floor — we love children, children are our future, we will fight for our children. Do we want their future to look like this, breathing through a device?”

Although breathing carbon dioxide is not directly responsible for respiratory difficulties except in small enclosed spaces, Boxer’s emphasis on public health highlights a theme that environmentalists, their Democratic supporters in Congress and the Obama administration have adopted as they regroup after their failure to enact a climate change bill in the last Congress.

The new Democratic strategy will be put to an early test when the Senate votes, probably this week, on up to four amendments designed to roll back the EPA’s regulatory authority.

In 2009, Democrats test-drove several themes — including the threats of global warming to national security and the promise of “green” jobs — without really settling on anything during their failed campaign to sell legislation that would cap emissions.

At that time, Republicans waged a relentless messaging war to defeat the climate change bill. “Cap and trade” proposals were dubbed “cap and tax” and called a “light-switch tax.” A release of embarrassing e-mails lifted from climate scientists was labeled “Climategate.” Global warming talks collapsed in the Senate, and triumphant Republicans turned their attention to a new target: the EPA.

But as Democrats move to a defensive posture, they may have finally found their voice. The basis for EPA legal authority to regulate emissions is a finding that global warming endangers public health and welfare and thus falls under the authority of the Clean Air Act. Armed with that position and bolstered by a Supreme Court decision, Democrats and environmentalists are presenting the GOP effort to rein in the EPA as an assault on the 40-year-old Clean Air Act and a direct threat to public health, a theme that has served them well in past fights over clean air and clean water.

“Defense is almost always easier to play than offense because we’re defending the status quo now, which is EPA setting pollution reduction standards to protect public health,” says Daniel Weiss, a climate expert at the liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund. “Last year, we were trying to change the status quo. That’s always harder.”

Weiss says the message reinforces the stereotype that Republicans put business interests ahead of the general public’s. “It makes them seem like they’re calloused to concerns about public health in order to make profits for companies that then turn around and give them lots of money.”

GOP strategist Frank Luntz — who famously advised Republicans in 2003 to avoid the phrase “global warming” in favor of the more benign “climate change” — warned in the same memo that health is a bigger priority for the public than concern about burdensome regulation.

“The public does not approve of the current regulatory process, and Americans certainly don’t want an increased regulatory burden,” he wrote. “But they will put a higher priority on environmental protection and public health than on cutting regulations.”

When congressional Democrats struggled to sell the public on an urgent need to regulate a ubiquitous gas like carbon dioxide, they downplayed the environmental and health justifications in favor of arguments that capping emissions would foster the explosive growth of low-carbon energy industries and create millions of green jobs. Framing the debate in economic terms, however, played into the hands of Republicans, who drowned out the “green jobs” message by stoking fears of higher energy costs and an exodus of blue-collar jobs.

Recent polling illustrates why Democrats have decided to play up fears about air pollution and public health and to play down global warming.

A Gallup Poll released last week asked respondents to rank their concerns about nine environmental issues. Only 51 percent said they worry a great deal or a fair amount about global warming — last on the list of issues. By contrast, 72 percent expressed worry about air pollution.

The League of Conservation Voters and the American Lung Association assert that recent research they commissioned shows broad public support for EPA regulation of carbon dioxide pollution, although conspicuously absent from the polling data is any mention of “global warming” or “climate change.”

The American Lung Association last month took that message straight to the Michigan district of House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, the lead sponsor of a GOP bill that would block the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases entirely. On a large billboard featuring a girl wearing a breathing mask, the girl implored him to “protect our kids’ health. Don’t weaken the Clean Air Act.”

Upton felt compelled to respond with an opinion column in a local newspaper defending his bill. “It does not limit EPA’s ability to monitor and reduce pollutants like lead and ozone that damage public health,” Upton wrote. “This legislation restores the Clean Air Act to its original purpose — protecting families from harmful smog, particulate matter and chemical pollution.”

The argument that Congress never intended the Clean Air Act to regulate unconventional pollutants such as carbon dioxide is at the heart of the EPA fight. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases fell within the purview of the law. That prompted a scientific review that culminated with the release of an “endangerment” determination in 2009.

Compiled by agency scientists, the finding lists a host of human health risks associated with a warmer climate caused by carbon dioxide, including an increased likelihood of deaths from heat waves and other extreme-weather-related events, as well as evidence that warming will increase the prevalence of disease. Significantly, the finding also cited an increased risk of ambient ozone — smog — which can cause a number of adverse respiratory and cardiovascular effects, especially in children.

That’s the basis for arguments like the emotional appeal that Boxer made on the Senate floor. Likewise, EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, in her frequent appearances this year before Republican-led House committees, has doggedly stuck to the public-health line in justifying her agency’s regulatory efforts.

Republican energy consultant Mike McKenna says the health argument could yield diminishing returns for Democrats if widespread public sentiment shifts against the notion that carbon dioxide, a gas that humans breathe every day, “is really a killer pollutant.”

McKenna acknowledges that the health argument is “always the environmental community’s strongest one, no matter what the issue.” But he also says Republicans have learned how to counterpunch. “That’s a pretty standard line of attack, and every Republican operative has seen it a hundred times and knows what to do about it,” he says.

He suggested that the argument may be problematic for Democrats from conservative or coal-dependent states, who face criticism from the right if they support President Obama’s environmental policies but risk alienating their Democratic base — and inviting primary challenges — if they distance themselves from the administration.

One such Democrat — Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania — says such concerns are overblown. Although some constituents in his coal-producing state do gripe about EPA overreach, he says, such complaints are far outpaced by broader economic concerns.

“Sometimes the lines that are connected here in Washington aren’t necessarily reflective of the way people at home analyze an issue like that,” he says. “And sometimes our discussions here can be remote from the real world.”

In the latest round of the battle set for this week, one proposal offered by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky would rescind outright the EPA’s legal authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Three milder alternatives offered by moderate Democrats would either delay or limit EPA regulation. None is expected to get the necessary 60 votes.

But McKenna, the GOP consultant, predicts that the outcome of the amendment votes will nullify any potential backlash against Republicans.

“At the end of the day, if you have 70 to 75 senators who are willing to go on record as saying, ‘I’m not really wild about what the agency is doing,’ that’s a pretty solid judgment from a pretty wide cross section of people that, you know what, there is zero risk in coming out against EPA on this thing,” he says.

Link: http://www.congress.org/news/2011/04/04/an_effort_to_keep_epa_authority/