Congress, Not EPA, Should Regulate Carbon Emissions

Many in Congress are beginning to push back hard against the Environmental Protection Agency's assertion that greenhouse gases — including carbon dioxide — are a public health danger. The regulations that would accompany this finding could be ruinous to the struggling economy. Congress should simply overturn the finding.

Responding to the pressure, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is backing away from some proposed regulations, raising the threshold for some emissions rules and promising to delay the implementation of others.

But Congress is better placed to weigh the costs and benefits of regulating carbon dioxide emissions. It is certainly far more accountable than the EPA for any economic damage caused by the regulations.

The Clean Air Act, under which the EPA is empowered to regulate polluters, was not designed to deal with climate change issues. And carbon dioxide is a natural element of Earth's atmosphere, which hardly fits the EPA's mandate to purify the air.

Congress should adopt proposed resolutions by U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, or such senior House Democrats as Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton of Missouri to rescind the EPA's finding on greenhouse gases.

Murkowski's resolution is supported by 41 U.S. senators, including three Democrats.

The Obama administration has been receiving queries and objections from many sources since the EPA finding was announced late last year.

The head of the Building and Construction Department of the AFL-CIO, in a letter to the White House, warned of the "severe negative consequences" for workers under the greenhouse gas-limiting rules.

The National Auto Dealers Association has also objected to the finding.

Eight U.S. senators, including Michigan's senior Democrat, Carl Levin, signed a letter to Jackson last month asking for details and expressing concerns over the EPA's proposed rules to curb carbon emissions from "stationary sources" such as power plants and factories.

They warned that "Ill-timed or imprudent regulation ... may squander critical opportunities for our nation, impeding the investment necessary to create jobs."

In replying to the letter from the eight senators, headed by West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller, Jackson warned that rescinding the finding would throw into jeopardy an arrangement orchestrated by the Obama administration to keep California and some other states from imposing their own rules limiting emissions.

But the head of the auto dealers responded to Murkowski that the president's administration had created the possibility of several levels of emissions regulation by granting California and other states a waiver to impose their own rules in the first place.

With the economy still fragile and the duration of high rates of unemployment at record levels since the end of the Second World War, imposing new regulations on greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act would be especially "ill-timed."

Congress should act to retain this regulatory power for itself.

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