GOP assails EPA ‘power grab’ ahead of vote to slow climate rules

More than a dozen House Republicans on Wednesday spoke forcefully against the Obama administration’s climate rule, hours before they vote on a bill to weaken and delay it.

The GOP said the Environmental Protection Agency’s rule amounts to a massive power grab that is illegal and unconstitutional and that lawmakers are obligated to protect states and citizens from it.

{mosads}“It is a radical regulation that will dramatically transform the way electricity is produced and regulated in America,” Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on power and the sponsor of the bill, told reporters outside the Capitol.

“It’s such a power grab, unprecedented, that we are going to take it up on the floor today,” he said.

“They’ve picked up a shotgun and pointed it at the heart of the American economy, our power generation,” Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) said of the EPA.

“This is just another example in a multitude of rules and regs so that [Obama] can complete an agenda, which is depriving us of low-cost, reliably, base-load energy,” said Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.). “When you do that, you raise rates.”

The EPA’s rule, which it plans to make final this summer, would seek to cut the power sector’s carbon output by 30 percent by 2030. It would mandate states to write plans to comply with individual carbon targets pre-determined by the agency.

Whitfield’s bill, the Ratepayer Protection Act, would let state governors opt out of the rule if they determine that compliance would raise electricity rates, hurt certain economic sectors or harm power reliability, at the governor’s sole determination.

The rule’s implementation would also be delayed until all court challenges to it are exhausted.

“If there were a real environmental reason that we needed to implement this, it’d be one thing,” Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) said of the rule.

“But even by EPA’s own models, the benefit of this plan is hundreds of years in the future. It’s all on this theory of global climate change, that the temperature of the Earth is getting warmer on average, because of CO2 emissions, primarily from coal-fired power plants. That is a theory, it is not a fact,” he continued.

Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) said the EPA is only giving states 13 months to write compliance plans because it is afraid that a court will overturn the rule.

“The reason that they’re only giving the states 13 months to comply with their plan, and they’re insisting that implementation begin in 2020, the EPA in my opinion is on this fast track because they know that their legal case is very, very weak,” he said.

GOP lawmakers said their bill is necessary to protect economies, consumers and states.

Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) called it a “common sense approach to addressing why the EPA’s rule will quite simply make it more expensive for power and energy, not only in Kentucky, but any area of the country.”

“Quite simply, this bill puts consumers first,” he added.

“The Ratepayer Protection Act puts control and the authority to say ‘no’ in the hands of state governors,” said Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio). “That is the right thing to do.”

Democrats have sharply criticized the bill.

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), top Democrat of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said it would “unnecessarily stall and delay implementation of the Clean Power Plan and also, it will spur countless and, in most cases, frivolous and meritless challenges to the plan in order to extend the ultimate compliance plan” and would weaken the decades-old protections of the Clean Air Act.

The Obama administration has also taken a dim view and pledged Tuesday to veto the bill if both chambers of Congress pass it.

Obama adviser Brian Deese said earlier this week that the president “has made it very clear that he is not going to accept attempts to undermine this very important work by Congress.”

The Senate GOP is working on a similar measure that would repeal the rule, give state governors more reasons they could reject compliance for a future rule, delay its implementation and make it much harder for the EPA to regulate power plants’ carbon emissions.