In a letter to the White House Office of Management and Budget, top House Republicans demanded the long-delayed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation for greenhouse gas pollution for very large emitters be killed. House energy committee chair Fred Upton (R-MI), former chair Joe Barton (R-TX), and energy and power subcommittee chair Ed Whitfield (R-KY) asked OMB acting director Jeffrey Zients to stay EPA’s regulation of new and modified power plants that produce more than 100,000 tons per year of carbon dioxide pollution:

We understand that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is currently reviewing the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposal to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from new and modified power plants through the New Source Performance Standards program. We write to request that you withhold the regulation from issuance. We are concerned about the regulation’s impact on jobs and the economy, and that it will not comply with all applicable Executive Orders, including the President’s Executive Order 13563 and its predecessor, Executive Order 12866.

“Our regulatory system must protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation,” begins Obama’s Executive Order 13563. “It must be based on the best available science.”

The EPA rule is the long-delayed result of a suit brought against the George W. Bush administration by several states in 2003, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 that the EPA had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The Bush White House then blocked the efforts by the EPA to comply with the law, and the Obama administration has slowly rolled out a watered-down rule that won’t reach full implementation until 2016. Scientists have warned that the United States needs to rapidly reduce its carbon pollution no later than 2015 for human civilization to have a reasonable shot at maintaining a safe climate, based on the best available science.

However, in the fantasy world of Upton, Barton, and Whitfield, global warming doesn’t exist — so even the EPA’s soft limits on carbon pollution are a “back door cap-and-trade regime” that will “burden struggling businesses and families,” instead of one of the most important accomplishments of Obama administration to protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation.

Electric utilities are the top contributors this cycle to Upton, Barton, and Whitfield. During this campaign cycle alone, the letter’s authors have received a combined $431,550 from electric power companies.

Download the anti-climate letter from Upton, Barton, and Whitfield to the OMB.

As U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administration Lisa Jackson announces the first-ever Clean Air Act rules to limit mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, Republicans are already attacking this historic advance for public health. The health risks of this potent neurotoxin are enormously well-documented. Methylmercury from coal pollution accumulates in fish, poisoning pregnant women and small children. Mercury can harm children’s developing brains, including effects on memory, attention, language, and fine motor and visual spatial skills. But Republicans are willing to argue that the profits of the coal industry outweigh the well-being of America’s children.

“There are already strict regulations relating to mercury emissions,” Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY), the chair of the House energy and power subcommittee, falsely claimed in an interview today with Fox News. “Obviously whatever controls the EPA has in place are not working if our fish are tainted,” Fox’s Alisyn Camerota shot back. Whitfield then made the false claim that “there is not going to be any benefit from this new regulation in reducing mercury levels”:

CAMEROTA: As I’m sure you know, for the past years doctors have been advising pregnant women not to eat any fish when they are pregnant because the mercury levels are so high in fish. So what to do about this? Obviously whatever controls the EPA has in place are not working if our fish are tainted.

WHITFIELD: Well, let me just say this to you, the scientists that testified before our committee were unanimous in the view that there is not going to be any benefit from this new regulation in reducing mercury levels. All of the benefits were calculated from the reduction of particulate matter, which is already covered under ambient air quality standard regulations. This is about closing coal plants, and that’s precisely what it is about.

Watch it:

Whitfield and energy committee chair Fred Upton (R-MI) have assiduously avoided having medical experts testify about the EPA’s mercury rules, instead parading utility and coal industry officials before their committee to make exaggerated claims about the costs of upgrading power plants to protect children’s health. At one such hearing, Rep. Joe Barton denied the “medical negative” of mercury exposure.

The glimmer of fact in Whitfield’s claims is that the health costs of mercury poisoning of our nation’s children over decades of unlimited coal pollution are difficult to quantify. Mercury poisoning is rarely fatal and hard to detect, but causes undeniable, insidious developmental harm to fetuses and babies.

Cost-benefit analyses conducted by epidemiologists for the new rule emphasize the equally real live-saving impact of cutting the deadly soot pollution from the few dozen ancient coal plants that emit most of the nation’s mercury pollution. By conceding that cutting the particulate matter would save thousands of lives, Whitfield was in effect admitting that current ambient air quality standards are not sufficient to protect American health either.

Economists are beginning to recognize that the costs of coal pollution outweigh the benefits of “cheap” coal electricity. Unless the coal industry cleans up its act, coal power is making the American economy sick.

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Today the House’s subcommittee on Energy and Power held a hearing on expediting the decision to permit the Keystone XL pipeline. In early November, under intense pressure from landowners in the path of the pipeline, environmentalists, and others, the president and the State Department delayed a decision on the pipeline until early 2013 while alternate routes are studied. As Politico’s Morning Energy reported, today’s hearing was “the first chance Republicans have gotten to vent in an official setting over the pipeline’s review being delayed by the administration.”

At the hearing, subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield (R-KY) said the president’s decision to delay the the pipeline had “nothing to do” with the state of Nebraska:

Why does the administration insist on waiting another minimum of 12-15 months to make a decision on this project? But even without their answers, I think it’s very safe to assume this latest delay has nothing to do with pipeline safety, oil sands production, or even the state of Nebraska. Instead, it has everything to do with appeasing a small, vocal group of opponents of this project.

Watch it:

Actually, the decision was very much in response to public concerns, and expressly those in Nebraska. After the delay was announced, State Department spokeswoman Kerri-Ann Jones told reporters that the

…message about the Nebraska Sand Hills has been coming strong and with increasing intensity.

And that:

The review we are doing is to specifically look at alternative routes through Nebraska. We won’t go more broadly than that.

Indeed, in late October Republican Gov. Dave Heineman (NE) called a special session of the state legislature to address his citizens’ concerns posed by the pipeline, and soon after the Republican-controlled legislature voted to reroute the pipeline so as to avoid the Sand Hills region and the Ogallala Aquifer. It is interesting to note that although TransCanada originally was strongly resistant to alternate routes for the pipeline, after the Nebraska vote the company is already working to find a new one.

Jane Kleeb, who testified today on behalf of BOLD Nebraska, further explained the position of Nebraska landowners in her testimony:

While the permit process may seem like it is taking too long, we still have no proposed route in Nebraska and no study on how tar sands affects our land, water and health. Additionally, if this oil is meant for the United States, then please make an agreement stating as much. Pass a bill saying the oil is for US consumption. It is hard to rationalize how a pipeline carrying oil across our nation to an unknown final destination can be in our national interest. We all know TransCanada and other tar sands companies need to get their oil to various ports in order to sell it to the highest bidder. In the end, we assume all the risks and none of the rewards.

One of the biggest issues discussed in the hearing was jobs. Republican members of Congress, the American Petroleum Institute, and TransCanada have all recently claimed that the Keystone XL pipeline would create upwards of 20,000 jobs. However, the State Department put the number of jobs created at 5,000-6,000, which in itself is criticized as an overestimate. In today’s hearing, both subcommittee Ranking Member Bobby Rush (D-IL) and Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) pointed out that even though they profess to wanting to create jobs, House Republicans have refused to bring President Obama’s American Jobs Act to a vote.

This is not the first time Republicans have tried to interfere with the Obama administration’s process. In July, the House passed Rep. Lee Terry’s (R-NE) North American-Made Energy Security Act, which would have required the president to make a decision on the pipeline’s approval by November 1, 2011. The Senate did not take up the bill. And, Senator Dick Lugar introduced a bill last week that would require the president to make a decision on the pipeline 60 days after his bill has passed, unless the pipeline was determined to not be in the national interest.

Terry, who will soon be introducing another bill to expedite the pipeline’s approval, announced before the hearing that House Speaker John Boehner has agreed to attach the new Keystone delay bill to legislation addressing unemployment insurance and payroll tax cuts.

Dominique Browning, lead blogger at Moms Clean Air Force, explains the latest effort by the GOP to undermine the health of children.

This week, House Energy and Power Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield, R-Ky, announced that House Republicans planned to release legislation in August that would slow the implementation of a proposed EPA rule to regulate hazardous air pollutants from coal-fired power plants.

Whitfield’s reasoning? To examine “whether or not technology is really available” to meet the guidelines.

Nonsense, of course. Whitfield knows perfectly well that the technology is available. Many CEOs of utilities nationwide have already installed modern–and made in the USA–technology to scrub smokestacks, in expectation of new EPA rules, some of which have been in the works for twenty-one years. These utility leaders signed a group letter to the Wall Street Journal supporting the EPA’s new Mercury and Air Toxics Standards. How many more decades do Whitfield’s polluting cronies need? Perhaps the polluters need to learn some lessons from their clean coal colleagues.

Apparently Whitfield is interested in reassessing the Clean Air Act. But that’s exactly what EPA has been doing. It’s job is to implement the Clean Air Act, and that’s why EPA is proposing new standards to protect people from Mercury and Air Toxics coming from some coal plants.

Polls show that the American public supports the Clean Air Act. Hundreds of medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Lung Association, have formed a coalition to support tougher restrictions on mercury and air toxic emissions. Apparently Whitfield does not agree with the public or medical professionals.

The American Lung Association released a report on the State of the Air. Kentucky’s rankings were abysmal–and should be an embarrassment for anyone representing that fine state.

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Some Republicans really don’t like the idea of new jobs. Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) , in his opening statement on the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454), attacked green jobs as “subprime” and “just like leaves on a tree” that disappear over time:

There’s little doubt in my mind that this legislation will shut down businesses and eliminate blue and white collar jobs. While I know the majority has prided its plan on the creation of green jobs mr chairman I have listened to some of our counterparts in Europe discuss their experience with these green jobs. It seems to me that green jobs, just like leaves on a tree, they may shine in the summertime when everything is sunny, but when the fall comes these leaves will fade and in winter they’ll be long gone. They may be described as “subprime” in comparison to solid traditional manufacturing jobs we’ve recently lost to other countries.

Watch it:

Gingrey and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY), who also attacked green jobs by reading from a National Post hit piece (which Whitfield mistakenly called the “New York Post”), were relying on a study by Spanish libertarian Gabriel Calzada that blamed Spain’s support for its renewable industry for its high current level of unemployment. The only problem is that the study — produced by a right-wing Spanish think tank — is “completely untrue.” The Wall Street Journal has pointed out that “the study doesn’t actually identify those jobs allegedly destroyed by renewable-energy spending” and that “hard to see how” Spain’s support for green jobs “could have edged out private-sector spending, especially when the Socialist government there has reduced corporate income-tax rates, most recently this past January.”

Gingrey was right when he said that “solid traditional manufacturing jobs” have been recently lost to other countries. His mistake is in not understanding that investing in green jobs is how to keep these traditional jobs in the United States — from designing, building, and transporting wind turbines to installing insulation and solar panels in millions of homes. Gingrey needs to spend more time in his district and visit his constituents working for green companies like the industrial heating engineering firm Sigma Thermal, home refitting company Wheeler’s Windows and Doors, and the electrical design engineering firm Lunar Accents Design. I doubt they consider their work to be “subprime.”

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