Week ahead: House GOP targets climate, ozone rules

Republican lawmakers are slated to resume their sharp criticisms of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The House Science Committee is bringing in critics of the EPA’s new ozone regulation made final this month, while the House Energy and Commerce Committee is planning a hearing on the legality of the climate rule for power plants.

Off Capitol Hill, the White House is holding an event Monday to show the administration’s progress toward an international climate agreement in Paris in December.

{mosads}Vice President Biden will give a speech, as will Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, senior White House adviser Brian Deese and Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren.

They’ll outline what the federal government, foreign nations, the private sector and others have done to reach a deal and more generally to cut greenhouse gases.

The regulations being examined in Congress are among the most controversial under President Obama’s EPA, and have received much attention from Republicans.

The ozone hearing Thursday is the first congressional inquiry into the rule since the EPA finalized it on Oct. 1. It reduces the allowable ground-level ozone concentration to 70 parts per billion, from 75.

The hearing on the climate rule, also on Thursday, will examine legal objections to the regulation before the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Energy and Power Subpanel.

It follows up on hearings in both chambers of Congress before the rule was made final that highlighted legal arguments against it, including those by Larry Tribe, a Harvard law professor working for coal miner Peabody Energy, who famously compared the rule to “burning the Constitution.”

Not to be outdone, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Oversight Subpanel will hold a wide-ranging hearing on the regulatory impact analyses for EPA regulations.

The subcommittee will bring in stakeholders and experts to examine whether the EPA has been following guidelines and laws cost-benefit analyses of regulations.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday is planning to hear from six people Obama has nominated to various administration posts in the Interior and Energy departments.

Mary Kendall, tapped to be the Interior Department’s inspector general, is the most controversial of the nominees, facing criticism from Republicans who say she goes too soft on the agencies she is supposed to be watching as the current acting head of the office.

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