White House disses Supreme Court, kills $2 trillion savings

The following post is by Earl Killian, guest blogger at Climate Progress.

The Wall Street Journal published new material ($ub. req’d) on the White House’s emasculation of last year’s Supreme Court global warming decision: The court told the EPA that the Clean Air Act requires it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The White House seeks to nullify that decision by stuffing the EPA document down a memory hole and substituting antithetical language. The WSJ has seen the EPA’s draft document and reports:

The draft … outlines how the government, under the Clean Air Act, could regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from mobile sources such as cars, trucks, trains, planes and boats, and from stationary sources such as power stations, chemical plants and refineries. The document is based on a multimillion-dollar study conducted over two years.

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The White House’s Office of Management and Budget has asked the EPA to delete sections of the document that say such emissions endanger public welfare, say how those gases could be regulated, and show an analysis of the cost of regulating greenhouse gases in the U.S. and other countries.

The OMB instead wants the document to show that the Clean Air Act is flawed and that greenhouse-gas regulations should be developed under new legislation, several people close to the matter said. The EPA needs to clear a final draft with the White House in order to release the document.

“This is a collision course between the agency and the OMB,” said one person familiar with the document. The OMB “had in mind to lay out a different story that the Clean Air Act is broken and can’t be used to regulate emissions.” The Clean Air Act was originally enacted in 1970 to clean up air pollution and was amended in 1990.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that the Clean Air Act can and should be used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. It ordered the EPA to assess whether GHG emissions endanger public health and welfare. The EPA draft found they did. By deleting that finding and instead asserting that Congress should pass new legislation, the White House is delaying.

The WSJ reported that the EPA draft found that “the net benefit to society could be in excess of $2 trillion.”

America and the world deserve to see the original EPA document, not a Ministry of Truth rewrite.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.