PoliticsDonald TrumpClimate ChangeEnvironmental Protection Agency

Republicans Look To Block EPA From Tackling Climate Change

“This is the legislative equivalent of trying to ban fire trucks while your house is burning."
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By 

Senior Reporter, HuffPost

GOP lawmakers have their sights set on stripping the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to take action on climate change.

Last week, Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.), a climate change denier, introduced the “Stopping EPA Overreach Act of 2017,” a resolution that seeks to rein in what he and dozens of other Republicans see as an abuse of statutory authority.

“No Federal agency has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under current law” and “no attempt to regulate greenhouse gases should be undertaken without further Congressional action,” it reads. 

Initially introduced as H.R. 3880 in 2015, the measure would rewrite the Clean Air Act to exclude greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, from air pollutants the EPA is able to regulate. Additionally, it would repeal two Obama administration climate regulations: the Clean Power Plan and a rule setting methane emission standards for oil and gas operations.

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Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) claimed last year that global temperature data has been manipulated by the government.
Bill Clark via Getty Images

Liz Perera, climate policy director at the Sierra Club, said the resolution would make it all but impossible for the federal government to combat a climate crisis that is already driving extreme weather.

“This is the legislative equivalent of trying to ban fire trucks while your house is burning,” she told The Huffington Post in an email, adding its sponsors “should be embarrassed for so blatantly ignoring reality and ashamed of themselves for so recklessly endangering our communities.”

Since President Donald Trump’s surprise election win, the EPA has found itself facing an uncertain future.

Both Trump and his nominee to lead the agency, Scott Pruitt, appear set on dismantling it. The Trump team is looking to cut the EPA’s budget by $815 million, including $513 million from states and tribal assistance grants and $193 million from climate programs, according to a report last week by Axios. 

Last week, the EPA froze its grant programs and told its staff not to post to social media or communicate with the press, as HuffPost reported. The agency has not posted to Twitter since Trump took office.

Clearly unsatisfied with the idea of gutting the agency, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has drafted a bill to “completely abolish” it.

In an email Friday, Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, expressed his disgust with what’s happening in Congress. 

“With the sideshow of Donald Trump serving as a distraction, the real damage is being done quietly by congressional republicans as they ram through a Koch Brothers-driven agenda to undermine efforts to combat climate change and to incentivize the environment-damaging fossil fuels they profit by,” he wrote. “It is obscene—it is an attack on the American people and indeed humanity, and it must be stopped.”

As of Friday, Palmer’s resolution had 114 co-sponsors ― all of them Republicans. It has been referred to four separate committees but not yet been scheduled for a hearing.

Neither the EPA nor Palmer’s office responded to HuffPost’s request for comment Friday. 

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Before You Go

Why Scott Pruitt Is A 'Dangerous' Choice To Lead The EPA
He has threatened to undermine protections for air and water.(01 of04)
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President Donald Trump is no environmental champion, but even he has said it's “vitally important" to have “crystal clean” air and water.Pruitt, however, has proven himself to be antagonistic to even this idea.

Since taking office as Oklahoma’s attorney general in 2011, Pruitt has sued the Environmental Protection Agency on multiple occasions in an effort to overturn rules limiting air pollution from power plants -- including the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, which curbs power plant emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, and the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which place limits on the amount of mercury, arsenic and other toxic pollution.

As Elliott Negin, a senior writer atthe Union of Concerned Scientists, explained in January, those are both life-saving regulations: “Taken together, they are projected to prevent 18,000 to 46,000 premature deaths across the country and save $150 billion to $380 billion in health care costs annually. In Pruitt’s home state, the two regulations would avert as many as 720 premature deaths and save as much as $5.9 billion per year.”

Pruitt sued the EPA in 2015 over the Waters of the United States rule -- which, in a piece co-written with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), he called the “greatest blow to private property rights the modern era has seen.” The rule, which is currently tied up in the courts, extends EPA protection to tens of millions of acres of wetlands and millions of miles of streams, including those that 1 in 3 Americans rely on for drinking water.

Pruitt also sued the EPA over its 2015 regulation strengthening the national health standards for ground-level ozone or smog pollution.

Several of these lawsuits are still ongoing, and environmental advocates have called on Pruitt to recuse himself from decisions related to the regulations he’s challenged in court. Legal experts told Bloomberg, however, that they knew of no rules in place that would compel such an action on Pruitt’s part.

“Every American should be appalled that President-elect Trump just picked someone who has made a career of being a vocal defender for polluters to head our Environmental Protection Agency,” Trip Van Noppen, president of Earthjustice, said in a December 2016 statement. “He has fought Environmental Protection Agency pollution limits on toxic substances like soot and mercury that put us all at risk for increased cancer, childhood asthma and other health problems. He falsely claims that fracking doesn’t contaminate drinking water supplies.” (credit:Reuters)
He doesn’t think the EPA is the “nation’s foremost environmental regulator.”(02 of04)
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During a House Science Committee hearing last year, Pruitt stressed that the EPA might need to intervene on some “air and water quality issues that cross state lines,” but that the agency “was never intended to be our nation’s foremost environmental regulator.”

“The states,” he said, “were to have regulatory primacy.”

As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt created a “federalism unit” with the specific aim of opposing federal protections and safeguards, including the Affordable Care Act and environmental regulations.

Under Pruitt, the EPA will likely witness “an increasing effort to delegate environmental regulations away from the federal government and towards the states,” Ronald Keith Gaddie, a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, told The New York Times.

Though states may be best equipped to regulate certain industries, some experts have stressed that environmental protection is one area that needs more federal oversight.

“Pollution doesn’t respect state boundaries,” Patrick A. Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law School, told the Times. “States have limited ability to regulate pollution from outside the state, and almost every state is downstream or downwind from other pollution.” (credit:Nick Oxford/Reuters)
He doesn’t believe in climate change.(03 of04)
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The EPA’s stance on global warming has been unambiguous.

“Climate change is happening,” the agency said on its website, adding that the EPA is “taking a number of common-sense steps to address the challenge” of warming, such as developing emissions reduction initiatives and contributing to “world-class climate research.”

Pruitt, like most of Trump’s Cabinet picks, is a climate change denier. Ignoring the overwhelming scientific consensus on the matter, Pruitt wrote last year that the debate on climate change is “far from settled.”

Gina McCarthy, the previous EPA chief, warned in November that denying the facts about climate change would undermine the United States' success both domestically and internationally. Other countries “are wondering if the U.S. will turn its back on science and be left behind,” she said.

“The train to a global clean-energy future has already left the station,” McCarthy added. “We can choose to get on board — to lead — or we can choose to be left behind, to stand stubbornly still. If we stubbornly deny the science and change around us, we will fall victim to our own paralysis.” (credit:Getty Images)
He’s a close ally of the fossil fuel industry ...(04 of04)
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… and their relationship has observers deeply concerned.

Since 2002, Pruitt has received more than $300,000 in contributions from the fossil fuel industry, including from political action committees connected to Exxon Mobil, Spectra Energy and Koch Industries. The New York Times reported in 2014 that he and other Republican attorneys general had formed an “unprecedented, secretive alliance” with major oil and gas companies to undermine environmental regulations. One of the firms, Oklahoma’s Devon Energy,drafted a letter for Pruitt to send to the EPA in 2011. Pruitt printed the document on state letterhead and sent it off, almost verbatim, to Washington.

As attorney general, Pruitt also filed several lawsuits with industry players, including Oklahoma Gas and Electric and the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, a nonprofit group backed by major oil and gas executives. In May 2016, Pruitt joined then-Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange in writing an opinion piece defending Exxon Mobil and other energy groups, after the oil giant came under scrutiny for allegedly failing to disclose its internal research on climate change.

The Times asked Pruitt in 2014 whether he’d been wrong to send letters to the federal government written by industry lobbyists, or to side with them in litigation. Pruitt was unapologetic.

“The A.G.’s office seeks input from the energy industry to determine real-life harm stemming from proposed federal regulations or actions,” his office said in a statement. “It is the content of the request not the source of the request that is relevant.”

Opponents, however, say Pruitt is a Big Oil ally — someone who, as EPA administrator, could prioritize industry interests over the health of the environment and the American people.

“This is a frightening moment,” Harvard University professor Naomi Oreskes said at a rally in December, referring to Trump's Cabinet picks. “We have seen in the last few weeks how the reins of the federal government are being handed over to the fossil fuel industry.”

“From denying settled climate science to leading the opposition of EPA’s Clean Power Plan, Pruitt has sent a loud and clear message to Big Oil and its well-funded mouthpieces that he’s their guy,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who is one of the senators calling for Pruitt to disclose more details on his connection to some oil-funded groups, according to Mother Jones. “To put a climate denier at the helm of an agency working to keep our environment safe is as dangerous as it gets.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, echoed similar concerns: “The American people must demand leaders who are willing to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels. I will vigorously oppose this nomination.”

It’s not just Pruitt’s fossil fuel connections that have raised eyebrows. A recent Environmental Working Group investigation found that Pruitt gave a regulatory pass to polluters from the poultry industry after receiving $40,000 in campaign donations from executives and lawyers representing poultry companies.

“Very clearly, this is someone coming in [to lead the EPA] with an ideology to deregulate at whatever government level he finds himself,” Cook, the EWG head, told The Huffington Post. “There’s no saying that ‘we just have a different philosophy’ about who should enforce environmental law. The philosophy, if it exists, is that environmental policy shouldn’t be enforced at a state or federal level. It is industry unrestrained.” (credit:Getty Images)
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