It’s always interesting to watch the political machinations of politicians in Congress.
As many know, a “GOP-led bill that would strip the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate greenhouse gases”…”sponsored by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), is expected to pass Thursday.”
Clearly, this bill contains substantive provisions intended curb the EPA power to regulate GHGs. As with nearly all bills, it has supporters and detractors. Not surprisingly, the supports of a “GOP-led bill” are mostly Republicans while detractors are mostly Democrats. In this particular instance I’m under the impression voting falls along highly partisan lines with only a few Democrats voting in favor of the bill.
It appears the bill has sufficient numbers of votes to pass.
Not surprisingly, opponents would like to get a silver lining out of introduction and passage of this bill. Being politicians, three Democratic representatives proposed an amendment to add window-dressing text which appears would have no functional effect. To that end, they have proposed modifying the bill to include text that would neither amplify nor reduce the degree to which the bill removes the EPA’s power to regulate CO2 or GHG. The amendment reads:
“Congress accepts the scientific findings of the Environmental Protection Agency that climate changes is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.†It was co-sponsored by Reps. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Diana DeGette (D-Colo.).
News articles I read do not mention whether Insley, DeGett or Waxman would actually vote for the bill if amended to include the text they propose. They do not mention if addition of this non-functional wording would sway the vote of even one Democrat. Though I could be wrong, I suspect the set of Congressional reps who would change a “no” vote to “yes” after addition of the language is what 5th graders are taught to call “the empty set”.
Still, I think Keith Kloor is “dead on balls accurate” when he describes introduction of the amendment as “a clever chess move”.
Proposing the amendment triggers a vote on whether to add non-functional window dressing language to the bill. There are all sorts of reasons Republican and some Democrats who support the bill aren’t going to vote to add this unnecessary, non-functional language to the bill. These could include, “I wouldn’t vote to add true but non-functional verbiage that reads ‘Congress accepts the theory of continental drift, the notion that chlorophyll makes many plants green and that 2+2=4’ either”, or “I’ll lose votes if I vote for that piece of do-nothing verbiage. Anyway Waxman, you haven’t agree to vote for the bill if we include that. Why should I vote to add it?” (The later reason assumes Waxman would not agree to vote for the bill after inclusion of the window dressing. )
Still, suggesting the window-dressing amendment is a brilliant chess move on the part of politicians. It permits Joe Romm to write headlines like “GOP-led House rejects science, 240-184”. Similarly shrill voices are likely to report it this way as well, and many who listen to those voices will think that GOP-led house actually voted to reject science.
Well… . The GOP-led house hasn’t actually rejected science. The GOP house has voted to reject an a proposal to add non-functional window dressing to a bill that would limit the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2.
Still, Keith is right: very clever chess move on the part of the Democrats. I think I can hear the clock ticking…. will the Republican’s move be equally clever?
Umm, it is my understanding that the EPA did not make any scientific findings regarding climate change, accepting in toto the IPCC assessment of the state of scientific understanding.
I don’t know, the justification provided by the majority in the House pretty clearly states that GHGs do not cause climate change:
“As the Court ruled, “Under the Act’s clear terms, EPA can avoid promulgating regulations only if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change or if it provides some reasonable explanation as to why it cannot or will not exercise its discretion to determine whether they do.†EPA wrongly decided that they do—and unleashed a regulatory barrage that is harming the economy and keeping unemployment high.”
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=390f31e3-c153-47fb-be59-a39590ccb44a
Tom Fuller,
The EPA considered a number of assessments, including the recent one by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (http://globalchange.gov/publications/reports/nrc-reports) and U.S. Global Change Research Program assessment (http://globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments), in addition to the IPCC AR4.
Hi Zeke,
Yes, I’d forgotten about the NAS assessment. As I wrote at the time (IIRC), the NAS also relied heavily upon the IPCC–something like two or three references per page.
Not saying it’s bad, and it clearly saved them time and money. But the EPA is charged with conducting its own findings of fact regarding substances they choose to regulate and they clearly did not do so for CO2.
This amendment business is pretty standard. The Republicans added one on the health care bill and the next year’s political ads were “Harry Reid voted to give Viagra to sex offenders!!!”
I’m sure Democrats do things nearly–if not just–as bad.
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/oct/08/sharron-angle/sharron-angle-attacks-harry-reid-over-giving-sex-o/
Oops. My post on these kinds of point-scoring amendments being common got hung because of a certain azure pharmaceutical.
(Edit:I was going to fix that missing word, but I like it better this way :))
Zeke– The House vote wasn’t on the merits of any specific language or claimed fact in that rebuttal. That particular bit might be the reason a representative voted against including the tacking on the Waxman language. Equally, a representative might vote against it as being non-functional window dressing verbiage. Yet another representative might agree the EPA found correctly, but thinks EPA regulation is not the way to regulate, or even that despite CO2 having the effect the EPA found, being opposed to regulation.
There are a while bunch of representative. Each NO vote can be cast for a different reason; each YES vote can be cast for a different reason.
Tom–
I think the EPA correctly found the scientific evidence shows CO2 causes warming. One political question I see is whether the House actually voted to reject science. I think they did not.
I want to note other questions could be asked. For example: Do certain members of Congress appear to reject science? I’d say yes. Do certain document written by groups of congressmen/committees etc. suggest those groups or committees reject science? Yes. Whoever specifically authored the EPA rebuttal Zeke linked did write “EPA wrongly decided that they do”, and that statement does constitute a rejection of science.
But the House vote wasn’t on that statement. It was a vote to include include non-functional language in a bill limiting the scope of the EPA’s regulatory power.
Lucia, I agree with you entirely.
However, once again, in their zeal to establish a ‘no-discussion zone’ they gave dissenters a club to beat them with by not following their own guidelines for assessment.
Lucia
I have been told on the Conserative back
channel that the counter move by Republicans is to offer an ammendment That asks the President not to beat his Spouse. We already have posters and blog posts ready to say Democrats who vote against it support Domestic Violence.
lucia,
While I agree that it is improper to conclude that every individual congress critter who voted against the amendment did so because they disagree with the idea that GHGs cause warming (many, for example, might be concerned with the cost/benefit calculus of mitigation), a disheartening number of them do seem to be (mis)using science in a proxy battle for what is ultimately a political decision (e.g. should GHGs be regulated).
The difficulty arises from the fact that the Supreme Court essentially required the EPA to impose some degree of regulation unless it “…determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change”, though the degree of regulation can change commensurate to the seriousness of the endangerment finding.
I seem to recall a republican senator killing science funding by linking it to watching porn at work. Silly stuff.
Doesn’t this particular amendment have a point in being the difference between “we accept the science but don’t want the EPA to regulate CO2” and “we don’t accept the science, thus we don’t want the EPA to regulate CO2” ? It may be window dressing but I think it still serves a valid point in this instance.
The EPA found that greenhouse gases would cause harm to human health, and that is what allowed them to regulate. They wrote about greenhouse gas pollution, which to some of us, is language corruption.
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/0ef7df675805295d8525759b00566924
Not much of a chess move.
The rejected amendments in the Senate with language watering down the GOP bill but still appearing to restrict EPA’s authority were more significant because they gave vulnerable Dems some cover–17 voted for one or more of the measures.
Outside of parts of San Francisco and a couple of college campus towns, AGW is not at the top of anybody’s issue list. For the vast majority of Members, any political benefit from planet-saving gestures is greatly outweighed by the risk of perception of economic harm if EPA significantly reduces energy use.
it is tiresome that so many people accept the Joe Romm-like maneuver of conflating The Science with a narrow command and control policy approach. The GOP measures to deny an AGW finding are more about canceling the statutory trigger for EPA authority than a statement of physics. If people are going the offer the non sequitur ‘There is man-made warming, therefore centralized economic planning control is the only choice” , the most direct statutory response is “There is no finding of man-made warming” which has the effect of removing EPA authority over the issue in toto. (Barring a court challenge that I can foresee but, I digress…)
It’s not about The Science. It’s about the legislative policy choices. Reaffirming one’s personal allegiance to The Science and feeling clever and superior for doing so may be satisfying for many but it does not address the issue of the range of existing choices. Worse, it tends to polarize the debate and create a sterile policy menu.
George Tobin,
I suspect rather strongly that those involved don’t think this outcome is ‘worse’… more likely they think it is a ‘better’ outcome. It is the all-or-nothing, compromise-is-a-sign-of-weakness POV, that is, the ideological POV.
The text of the repeal bill does not have any scientific conclusions. It overrules the EPA finding, but that looks like details to the larger purpose.
Zeke
Agreed. I think more precise statements like this are more useful than Romm argument by headline mischaracterization of what the House vote actually did.
The ruling caused difficulties. I don’t think the fault lies with the Supreme court or the EPA. Congress passed the clean air act in 1970, and evidently, the wording resulted in the Supreme Courts ruling. This is likely an inefficient way to deal with CO2 which is qualitatively different from things like sulfur.
I can’t really expect the 1970 Congress to anticipate every hot-button issue that will be important in 2011. But it is time for Congress to deal with this.
Chris Brown
Well… that’s a rhetorical question. Can you suggest how you would answer it. Because my answer would start with “That’s not the point of this amendment. Not the point. At. All. “
lucia (Comment#73197) April 7th, 2011 at 1:24 pm
That’s the point of the amendment. It is what it says it is. Line up those who agree or disagree with the science.
The entire fiasco stems from the tendency to use rather loose language in writing laws. Had the authors of the Clean Air Act used words that reflected the intent of the law more clearly (it was intended to deal with emissions that were known to be toxic to people.. like CO, NOx, SO2, etc.), then there would be no possibility of someone 40 years later using unclear language to institute regulations that are wholly disconnected from the original intent of the law. The Clean Air Act should have simply enumerated the substances to be subjected to regulation and compelled the EPA to return to Congress for authorization of regulation of new substances of concern.
“Still, Keith is right: very clever chess move on the part of the Democrats. I think I can hear the clock ticking…. will the Republican’s move be equally clever? ”
Getting Obama to threaten to veto a bill that ensures that soldiers will get paid even if there isn’t an agreement on the overall budget? I think that might be just a bit more politically harmful than some obscure (to those 70-80% of the populace who don’t much pay attention) fight over EPA regulations.
SteveF (Comment#73225)
Well, CO2 is toxic to people. Howver, pollution is what in excess causes environmental problems. CO2 is just that.
bugs:
Only in much higher quantities than are typically found on the Earth (there have been exceptions), and at a level much higher than realistically can be expected from peak CO2, with most of the future CO2 emissions that bring it to that level coming from other countries than the US, and the evidence is still not clear whether any net benefit would come to the US from regulation of CO2 (since they can’t regulate China, India and the other 96% of the worlds CO2 emitters).
We also allow other chemicals to be released which have much more immediately harmful effects, e.g. nitrogen fertilizers, and even water used in irrigation has a long-term poisoning of the soil.
If I were to pick which thing the EPA should address first, given finite resources and expected net impact, it wouldn’t be CO2.
Bugs,
Sure, but not at any level that could conceivably occur in Earth’s atmosphere due to human emissions. The CO2 concentration in your bedroom is probably three or four times that in the free atmosphere… yet you are still quite alive each morning. Nitrogen is also toxic to people.. at outlandishly high concentrations, as is oxygen. To suggest that CO2 is the kind of “toxic pollutant” the Clean Air Act was designed to control is utter nonsense.
bugs:
That is kind of a stretch. The harm envisioned by the Act is in the nature of breathing problem, crop destruction and other adverse effects from direct contact with the harmful substance to be regulated.
If that standard were applied, CO2 is not actually harmful until concentrations increase by magnitudes so EPA would merely ban outdoor concentrations in the 1000s of ppm, not try to make climate policy.
The Supreme Court decision that created this mess was that more CO2 will cause the oceans to rise and therefore Massachusetts will lose taxable land therefore CO2 is kinda like a harmful pollutant. Given that most of the offending CO2 will emanate from outside the U.S., and that the alleged harm is highly speculative, mandating EPA action is both statutorily dubious and superfluous.
But the important thing is that 5 Justices got to feel ever so au currant and affirm The Science.
The result will be that EPA will cause as much economic pain as it can get away with without incurring bi-partisan Congressional retaliation so there will be no climate-significant reductions in emissions. We will be also further removed from a serious energy policy, waste some money and waste some time. EPA is simply not designed for this kind of mission.
The EPA finding was endangerment. One can agree that CO2 will cause some warming and disagree that it constitutes endangerment. Endangerment is related to IPCC WG II, not WG I, which is about The Science. The WG II report is where the melting Himalayan glacier flap was located.
I see borris is about the only commenter who understands the political system and strategy… although I see that he just recently figgered that worddpress and viagruh dont mix
House passes Upton’s bill to halt EPA’s GHG regulations
Apr 7, 2011 Nick Snow OGJ Washington Editor
Now if that is tied to the Republican budget bill, the stakes get interesting!