Donald Trump wants to dismantle Obama's Clean Power Plan. It’s trickier
than it looks. By Brad Plumer 11/10/16
Donald
Trump has made it
perfectly clear that one of his top priorities is to
dismantle the climate change regulations that President Obama has put in place
over the past eight years. But the details of how he tries to do this matter
enormously, and anyone interested in climate policy should pay close attention
to the nuances here.
Trump
will have a lot of power, on his own, to stall or weaken Obama’s key climate
rules, particularly the Clean Power
Plan that regulates CO2 from power plants.
It's not easy, but he has a fair but of leeway here.
The
more pressing question, though, is whether Trump and the GOP Congress will pass
a bill that will prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from ever regulating carbon dioxide again. If
they did that, that would kill the Clean Power Plan entirely and would
prevent any future presidents from tackling climate change the way Obama did.
That
latter move is a much, much bigger deal, and it depends on whether Democrats in
Congress can stop this from happening. So let’s walk through the scenarios.
1) President Trump can weaken Obama’s Clean Power Plan on his
own. This part’s doable.
First,
some context: Back in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA was required to regulate
greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide under the existing Clean Air Act, so long
as there was evidence that these pollutants harmed public health and welfare
(which, scientists agree, there is).
Obama
took that ruling and ran with it, issuing EPA regulations on new power
plants, cars and trucks, methane leaks from natural gas drilling, and more. But
the centerpiece of his agenda was the Clean Power
Plan, which would aim
to cut CO2 emissions from coal and gas-fired plants some 30 percent below 2005
levels by 2030. Under the rule, every state has to come up with its own plan
for cutting emissions.
The
Clean Power Plan is not yet in effect — it’s being
challenged in
a lawsuit that the DC Circuit Court is still mulling. So Trump has a couple of
options here if he wants to weaken or block it, as Nathan Richardson, a legal
expert with Resources for the Future, nicely details.
·
First,
Trump could decline to defend the rule and hope it dies in court (remember, he
gets to appoint a replacement to Antonin Scalia, so the Supreme Court could
well strike the whole thing down).
·
Second,
if the DC Circuit Court hasn’t ruled on the Clean Power Plan by January 20, the
Trump administration could ask it to send the rule back to the EPA and then
just redo the whole thing, likely making it weaker or toothless. This would be
known as a “voluntary remand.”
·
Third,
if the courts did uphold the Clean Power Plan, Trump could order the EPA to
start all over and rewrite an entirely new (weak) rule. This isn't easy: it would take at
least 12 to 15 months, and would involve a notice, a proposed rule, soliciting
public comment, and so on. And the process would likely get bogged down by
lawsuits from environmental groups (which are very, very skilled at this sort
of litigation). But it’s doable.
·
Fourth,
Trump’s EPA could simply decline to enforce Obama’s Clean Power Plan very rigorously.
Again, he might face lawsuits here, but this is totally feasible. He could let
recalcitrant states like Texas and West Virginia come up with very, very weak
state implementation plans.
"There’s
a lot of latitude in the review process," Michael Wara, an expert on
energy and environmental law at Stanford, told me earlier this year. "The
history of the Clean Air Act shows this. If you have a president who doesn’t
like climate policy, they could basically signal to the states that they’re going
to give a lot of compliance flexibility and allow states to make assumptions in
their plan that reduce their costs."
For
Trump, the upside of taking this route is that he could do this on his own. No
one can stop him from rewriting EPA rules. The downside is that this would only
be temporary. The Clean Power Plan would still technically be floating around,
and a future president who cares about climate change could restart the
process, forcing emissions reductions anew.
So
if Trump and the GOP really wanted to forestall future climate action, they’d
have to go through Congress. And that’s when things get trickier.
2) Only Congress can permanently neuter the EPA’s climate
powers — unless Democrats stop them
The
second, more radical option would be for Trump and the GOP Congress to pass a
bill that explicitly forbade the EPA from ever tackling greenhouse gases again.
That would override the Supreme Court’s ruling. And it would just require a
simple amendment to the Clean Air Act. House Republicans have floated
such a bill over and over before, and presumably they’ll try
again.
The
catch here is that Senate Democrats could try to filibuster this bill —
Republicans only have 52 Senate seats, and they need 60 to overcome a
filibuster. So that leaves a few possibilities:
·
It’s
possible that Democrats could hold together and block any efforts to amend the
Clean Air Act. If successful, that would at least allow the next president to
take up EPA rules on climate change and restart what Obama did.
·
Alternatively,
Senate Democrats might just cave. Note that a couple of their key members, like
Joe Manchin (WV) and Heidi Heitkamp (ND), are up for reelection in 2018 in
Trump-friendly, fossil fuel–heavy states.
·
Third,
Senate Republicans could try to scrap the filibuster altogether and pass their
CO2 bill with 51 votes. This isn’t guaranteed, especially with some Republicans
strongly in favor of keeping the filibuster, but it’s entirely plausible. See Gregory
Kroger’s post for more detail on this.
·
Fourth,
Republicans could try to attach their anti-CO2 regulation amendment to a
bigger, more popular bill — like Trump’s proposed infrastructure package, which has already attracted interest from
several Democrats. In that case, much would hinge on whether Democrats want to
make the EPA’s authority to regulate CO2 an absolute deal breaker.
·
Fifth,
it’s possible that Republicans could decide this legislative battle is simply
not worth the political headaches, especially with Trump putting a freeze on
EPA rules anyway, and drop any plans to amend the Clean Air Act. This one seems
unlikely given how much the conservative base and key industry supporters hate
climate regulation, but it’s possible.
Note
that a bill to take away the EPA’s right to regulate CO2 would have
far-reaching effects. It would undo methane regulations on the oil and gas
industry. It would undo the fuel economy standards that Obama has put in place
for cars and light trucks. It would undo fuel efficiency rules for heavy
trucks. And, most importantly, it would prevent any future presidents from
taking unilateral climate action.
A
bill like this could also have unintended ripple effects, as Gavin Bade points out at Utility Dive. Back in 2011, the
Supreme Court ruled in AEP v. Connecticut that individuals could not file
nuisance lawsuits against CO2 polluters because the EPA
was already regulating the pollutant. But if the EPA can’t regulate the pollutant, those costly
nuisance suits could become an issue again.
It’s
also worth observing that scrapping the Clean Power Plan or fuel economy rules
won’t kill all efforts to
tackle climate change in the United States. Even if Trump gets his way, states like
California will
keep pushing forward with de-carbonization anyway, harnessing the growth of
wind and solar and efficiency. Natural gas from the fracking boom will keep
killing coal power. But these EPA rules are still extremely significant, and
they were intended to accelerate efforts to decarbonize the power sector. If
the GOP scraps them, that will almost certainly blunt the place of climate
action in the United States.
Which
means this is going to be a defining environmental battle going forward. Green
groups are likely to make protecting the EPA one of their top priorities for
the next four years. It’s the difference, after all, between a mere delay in
climate action while Trump is president and a lasting policy shift that will
prevent future presidents from switching course.
http://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2016/11/10 /13587474/donald-trump-obama-climate-policy
Comments
This article was written by a "hopeful" Liberal Democrat, but it does reveal what their hollow arguments could be. Global warming is headed to the dust bin of failed hoaxes.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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