(Credit: NY Times)

Gina McCarthy finally got a vote.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing yesterday to vote on McCarthy’s nomination to be the next EPA Administrator. This came after a week of obstruction from the Republican members of the committee, who boycotted the scheduled vote last week.

As one of the most highly-qualified nominees to lead the Environmental Protection Agency in its history, McCarthy has understandably won plaudits from Republicans like Senator James Inhofe and energy industry titans like American Electric Power. She has been dubbed the “green quarterback” in President Obama’s administration as well as former Governor Mitt Romney’s. Indeed, McCarthy was approved by the full Senate in 2009 for her current position leading the Office of Air and Radiation by a voice vote.

Carol Browner, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, expressed hope that McCarthy would receive a similar vote before the full Senate:

I commend the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works for approving the nomination of Gina McCarthy. Not only is she a seasoned civil servant with decades of experience, she is clearly a bipartisan nominee, having worked as an environmental adviser for both Republican and Democratic governors. The Senate already confirmed her once for her current role at the EPA, and I hope they move forward expeditiously with her current confirmation so that she can continue her lifelong work of protecting children and families from air pollution and other hazards.

The ranking member of the committee, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), outlined five “requests” prior to last week’s scheduled vote, and cited dissatisfaction with EPA’s responsiveness to those five requests as the reason all committee Republicans boycotted last week’s vote. These five questions mainly involve transparency issues: two have been fully satisfied and are moot at this point. In fact, each have been answered, and the reasonable requests fulfilled.

What are the points of contention? The only things EPA will likely not do is:

• release the full data behind air pollution studies that reveal personal medical information — EPA has released the rest of the data
• adopt an industry-backed “cost-benefit” analysis for its regulations in place of several comprehensive cost-benefit analyses that take environmental and health factors into account
• give corporations and industry parties the right to join all EPA settlement talks in lawsuits against the agency for violating the law as “intervenors,” allowing industries that pollute illegally sit in on talks about the response to their own illegal activities

Requests to do any of these things are far beyond the scope of a confirmation vote. EPA and Gina McCarthy have acquiesced to all reasonable demands from Senate Republicans. Vitter essentially said so during yesterday’s hearing:

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A coalition of over 100 “clean air ambassadors” — including nurses, physicians, clergy members, labor leaders, tribal leaders, and social justice activists — descended on Capitol Hill Wednesday to call on Congress to protect children, the elderly, the poor, and other vulnerable Americans from the health threats of air pollution, smog, and rising carbon emissions.

They represented a range of groups from all fifty states, as well as Puerto Rico, all organized under the “50 States United For Healthy Air” campaign. They spoke this week with elected officials to call for several needed changes:

1) Finalize new carbon limits for new power plants, and establish limits for existing power plants. The regulations for new plants are in the works, driven by a Supreme Court ruling that the executive branch has the power and legal obligation to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. The Obama Administration hasn’t decided yet what to do about emissions from already existing plants, but the National Resources Defense Council recently came up with an impressive proposal. And this can all be done without the need for legislative approval from Congress.

As the “50 States United For Healthy Air” campaign notes, the rising temperatures driven by climate change intensify the damaging health effects of smog and other pollutants. On top of that, climate change can alter the spread of diseases and increase deaths due to heat waves, and all these effects fall harder on poorer and more vulnerable populations.

2) Finalize federally enforceable coal ash rules. Coal ash is created whenever coal is burned, and generators often then dump the toxic residue in landfills — which have given way on more than one occasion, leading to spills that are hazardous to both the environment and human health. Meanwhile, the EPA’s regulations of coal ash have been stuck in limbo for years.

3) Strengthen standards limiting air pollution and smog. Along with carbon dioxide, the burning of fossil fuels emits all sorts of other pollution into the air we breath, driving up rates of asthma, heart and lung disease, hospital visits and premature deaths. Again, these harms fall hardest on children, the old, the poor, and minorities.

Estimates of new EPA rules to crack down on these pollutants suggest the limits could prevent 21,600 premature deaths, 12,540 hospitalizations, 199,000 asthma cases each year. The rules include standards for power plants and industrial emitters, as well as the still-being -developed “Tier 3″ standards for motor vehicles. But again, the rules are still awaiting finalization.

“50 States United For Healthy Air” includes representatives from the American Nurses Association, Earthjustice, the Hip Hop Caucus, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Council of Churches, the National Latino Coalition on Climate Change, and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Zero Republicans show up to vote on Gina McCarthy's nomination to be EPA Administrator.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee was scheduled to vote today at 9:15 on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to be the next EPA Administrator. Despite the fact that she has answered more than a thousand of the committee’s questions, Senate Republicans announced just before the hearing that they would be boycotting the vote, denying the committee quorum and postponing the confirmation hearing.

The committee rules require that at least two members of the minority party be present during a vote. Not a single Republican bothered to show up.

Senator Barbara Boxer, Chair of the committee, still held a meeting, allowing the Democrats in attendance to try to explain to the American people why they still have no EPA Administrator. The ostensible reason that the Republicans boycotted today’s vote was because they said she did not satisfactorily answer their questions. Senator Boxer reminded those present that Gina McCarthy has already answered more than a thousand questions from the committee and moreover is eminently qualified with an excellent track record of working with the business community and and both parties to do her job. Boxer later floated the idea of changing the rules of the committee so that a boycott such as this would not gum up the works. She urged her GOP colleagues to listen to the many “mainstream” Republicans who support Gina McCarthy’s nomination and “get out of the fringe lane.” If senators oppose a nominee, they should show up and vote against the nominee, not hold the process hostage for ideological reasons.

In 2009, the Senate easily confirmed the highly qualified McCarthy by a voice vote to head the Clean Air division of the EPA. With nearly three decades of experience working at the local, state and federal levels, McCarthy has been a champion for clean air and has even won plaudits from Republican leaders. She has received extensive support from business, health officials, environmental organizations and scientists, who have repeatedly suggested she is willing to work with all sides to find the best outcome.

At her confirmation hearing last month, Ms. McCarthy answered the committee’s questions and the Republican members failed to pin anything on her. Instead they focused on climate denier talking points and questions about instant messenger (something that McCarthy jovially admitted she was too old to know how to use.)

At today’s meeting, Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) argued that she deserved a vote because she answered all the questions that had been asked of her. He said that former EPA Administrators were used to questions (400 for Mike Leavitt, 100 for Lisa Jackson), but Ms. McCarthy’s 1,000 was unprecedented. “It’s bad for our country,” he said, when Senators fail to do their jobs to ensure that the executive branch does not turn into a “swiss cheese” of vacant seats, acting administrators, and delayed appointments.

Carper said she has been a proven public servant: “The president didn’t nominate somebody we don’t know. He nominated somebody who’d been unanimously confirmed by this committee and I think maybe by the senate” for her current position at the EPA.

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From the 2012 Presidential campaign onwards, Republicans have railed against the regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as “job-killing,” as a threat to freedom, and as a drag on economic growth. The claim has never comported with evidence, but like a zombie it just refuses to die.

The latest effort to kill it comes via a new study from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which found that the benefits EPA regulations bring to the economy far outweigh the costs.

The way this works is pretty straight-forward. Environmental regulations do impose compliance costs on businesses, and can raise prices, which hurt economic growth. But they also create jobs by requiring pollution clean-up and prevention efforts. And perhaps even more importantly, they save the economy billions by avoiding pollution’s deleterious health effects. Particles from smoke stacks, for example, are implicated in respiratory diseases, heart attacks, infections and a host of other ailments, all of which require billions in health care costs per year to treat. Preventing those particles from going into the air means healthier and more productive citizens, who can go spend that money on something other than making themselves well again. Another example is carbon emissions, which will impose costs on the economy in the form of future disruption to food supplies, destruction from extreme weather, and other upheavals if they’re not curbed. Researchers generally put those costs at around $20 to $25 per ton of carbon, but estimates vary widely. Other regulations are actually aimed at reducing red tape, improving communication between agencies, and facilitating the flow of information.

The OMB study looked at a range of regulations across the economy, and found their benefits outweighed their costs across the board. The blue and red bars below represent the range of estimates for what the respective costs and benefits of regulations were. In very few instances was even the very upper limit of cost estimates equal to the very lower limit of benefit estimates.

Source: Office of Management and Budget

But no where was the effect greater than with EPA regulations themselves. Over the last decade, they imposed as much as $45 billion in costs on the economy, but they also drove as much as $640 billion in benefits:

The OMB found that a decade’s worth of major federal rules had produced annual benefits to the U.S. economy of between $193 billion and $800 billion and impose aggregate costs of $57 billion to $84 billion. “These ranges are reported in 2001 dollars and reflect the uncertain benefits and costs of each rule,” the report noted.

Rules from the EPA added significantly to both sides of the ledger. “It should be clear that the rules with the highest benefits and the highest costs, by far, come from the Environmental Protection Agency and in particular its Office of Air and Radiation,” the OMB study said. EPA regulations accounted for between 58% and 80% of the benefits the study found as well as 44% to 54% of the costs. Air regulations accounted for nearly 99% of EPA rule benefits, according to the report.

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Republicans tried and failed to pin anything on Assistant Administrator for EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, Gina McCarthy. When she appeared before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee as President Obama’s nominee to be the next EPA Administrator, some Senators focused on substance, and others focused on denying climate change or asking about email addresses and instant messenger.

First some reality. Echoed by several of his colleagues, Senator Bernie Sanders’s opening statement broke through the rhetoric and clarified the debate over McCarthy, EPA, and climate change. After hearing Senator Barrasso’s hyperbolic opening statement about “extreme emissions rules” and the “war on coal” (in fact, the industry is growing under President Obama), he cut to the chase.

This is not a debate about Gina McCarthy. Senator Barrasso made it very clear what this debate is about. It is a debate about global warming, and whether or not we are going to listen to the leading scientists of this country who are telling us that global warming is the most serious planetary crisis that we and the global community face — and whether we are going to address that crisis in a serious manner.

And in essence what Senator Barrasso has just said is “no” — he does not want the EPA to do that. He does not want the EPA to listen to science. What he wants is us to continue doing as little as possible, as we see extreme weather disturbances, drought, floods, and heat waves all over the world take place. So let me go on record as saying I want the EPA to be vigorous in protecting our children and future generations from the horrendous crisis that we face, from global warming.

Across the dais, the rhetoric had a different focus. Senator Boozman said that he is an optometrist by trade, and is therefore “familiar with the scientific world.” He used this familiarity to question EPA data release and personal confidentiality practices. McCarthy politely answered his question with a promise to ensure he had all the data he needed, ostensibly to run climate models on his own time.

Several GOP Senators focused their questions on transparency, particularly the ongoing debate over secondary email addresses used by past EPA Administrators. As Chairwoman Boxer noted, the practice of having a secondary email address was started by EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman because Administrators can get up to 41,000 emails per day. Even so, McCarthy stated she has never used her personal account for official EPA business.

In fact, when Senator David Vitter asked her about her use of instant messenger, she replied that one of the things about being 58 is that she has no idea how to use IM. A large portion of many GOP Senators’ questioning revolved around these irrelevant email issues, instead of cleaning up the environment, climate change, or air pollution.

No hearing about the EPA would be complete without some denial of climate change, and while Senator Inhofe certainly did his best to fill that role, Senator Sessions stood out in terms of the substance and the condescending manner in which he asked whether it was really getting warmer.

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By Lisa Heinzerling

In his new book, “Simpler: The Future of Government,” Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein writes about his nearly four years as President Barack Obama’s “regulatory czar.” As the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (known as “OIRA”) within the Office of Management and Budget, Sunstein oversaw the regulatory output of the many agencies of the executive branch. Rules on worker health, environmental protection, food safety, health care, consumer protection, and more all passed through Sunstein’s inbox.

Some never left. A group of Department of Energy efficiency standards, for example, have languished at OIRA since 2011, as has an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule to finally reduce exposure to the silica dust that sickens workers every year.

In his revealing book, Sunstein tells us why: It is because he, Sunstein, had the authority to “say no to members of the president’s Cabinet”; to deposit “highly touted rules, beloved by regulators, onto the shit list“; to ensure that some rules “never saw the light of day”; to impose cost-benefit analysis “wherever the law allowed”; and to “transform cost-benefit analysis from an analytical tool into a “rule of decision,” meaning that “[a]gencies could not go forward” if their rules flunked OIRA’s cost-benefit test.

Assertive intrusions into agencies’ prerogatives — prerogatives given by law to the agencies, not to OIRA — were necessary, Sunstein insists, because otherwise agency decisions might be based not on “facts and evidence,” but on “intuitions, anecdotes, dogmas, or the views of powerful interest groups.” In Sunstein’s account, OIRA’s interventions also ensured “a well-functioning system of public comment” and “compliance with procedural ideals that might not always be strictly compulsory but that might be loosely organized under the rubric of ‘good government’.” No theme more pervades Sunstein’s book than the idea that government transparency is essential to good regulatory outcomes and to good government itself.

The deep and sad irony is that few government processes are as opaque as the process of OIRA review, superintended for almost four years by Sunstein himself. Few people even know OIRA exists; in fact, the adjective that most often appears in descriptions of this small office is “obscure.” Even fewer people know that OIRA has effective veto power over major rules issued by executive-branch agencies and that the decision as to whether a rule is “major” — and thus must run OIRA’s gauntlet before being issued — rests solely in OIRA’s hands. Most people, I would venture to guess, think that the person who runs, say, the Environmental Protection Agency is actually the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. But given OIRA’s power to veto rules, the reality is otherwise: In the rulemaking domain, the head of OIRA is effectively the head of the EPA.

This state of affairs poses several problems. Two have to do with law. One problem is that laws on workplace health, environmental protection, food safety and other protections give agencies — like OSHA, EPA, and the FDA — the authority to make rules. They do not give this authority to OIRA. No statute, in fact, gives OIRA the power to review agencies’ rules. This power today derives, instead, from a set of executive orders issued by Presidents Clinton and Obama. But it is a large question whether a law giving rulemaking authority to one part of government is properly construed as giving authority to another part of government, designated by the President. Most agree that a statute giving authority over food safety to the FDA does not allow the President to turn that power over to the Department of Agriculture. It is a little hard to see why that same statute can be interpreted to turn the power over to OIRA.

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“Folks, last week, President Obama cynically used the inaugural address to push his radical pro-survival agenda. Folks, I didn’t think this part of his speech would get any traction, because there’s no national consensus on climate change. It’s like if JFK announced the Apollo program, but half the country denied the Moon exists.” -Stephen Colbert

“And reality has a well-known liberal bias.” -Stephen Colbert

The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has a subpanel on the environment — and it has become a strange thing to watch this year.

Its new chairman is a climate denier. It scheduled a hearing about climate change featuring climate deniers but since most of Washington DC shut down for a blizzard that manifested itself in the city as a lot of rain, they postponed it. Other committees, like the House Energy and Commerce Committee, have been refusing to hold hearings on climate change. Therefore this subcommittee is becoming the only option to hear in person what the House of Representatives thinks about climate change (short of catching a one minute speech on the House floor from the Safe Climate Caucus).

On Wednesday, the subcommittee on the environment investigated the EPA’s Science Advisory Board. This is the EPA’s scientific body it consults as it writes regulations — such as clean air and fracking rules.

Last year, the House GOP introduced legislation to reform the board because it said there is not enough industry representation, and too many scientific experts on the board receive EPA grants. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse showed in 2008 how industry (i.e. ExxonMobil and Dow) can gain harmful influence over scientific panels. During this hearing, the members debated similar legislation for the new congress.

Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists testified that the draft bill would not help the integrity of the scientific process:

This draft bill contains provisions that would slow the work of the Scientific Advisory Board, remove longstanding and widely accepted practices for dealing with conflicts of interest and reduce the expertise of Scientific Advisory Board members.”

This debate appears to be more an instance of lawmakers seeing data they do not like, and going back to the drawing board to change the rules to get a different result. There is scientific consensus that humans cause climate change, that it is a serious threat to our civilization, and we need to act now.

Subcommittee Chairman Chris Stewart (R-UT) finished his statement noting he was just here to help: “If the EPA scientific process is viewed as being biased, or less than willing to consider every point of view, their credibility suffers.” This would have been more credible if he had not just introduced the EPA as a job-killing monster:

Whether it is promulgating air quality regulations that could shut down large swaths of the West, undertaking thinly veiled attacks on the safety of hydraulic fracturing, or pursuing job-killing climate regulations that will have no impact on the climate, EPA’s reputation as a lightning rod for controversy is well known here in Washington and throughout the country.

When a series of doctors tell a patient about a serious health condition, accusing the doctors of bias does not heal anything.

On Monday the Senate held a symposium under the auspices of Sen. Tom Carper’s (D-DE) office — “Climate Change Actions under the Clean Air Act: Reducing Power Plant Emissions without Harming the Economy” — bringing together representatives from both clean energy groups and the energy industry to explore how greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants could be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

The Supreme Court has ruled that under that law, the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate carbon dioxide emissions if it finds them to be a danger to public health and the environment — which it has. The EPA is already finalizing rules for new power plants, with rules for existing plants anticipated to be in the works, which brings us to the symposium’s question of just how to apply those powers.

The stand out presentation came from David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which lays out a plan for the EPA to cut carbon emissions from power plants 26 percent from 2005′s levels by 2020. The plan was run through the same model used by the EPA and a host of other outfits, and according to the analysis it would prevent 3,600 deaths and thousands of other health incidents by 2020, deliver $25 to $60 billion in savings (depending on your preferred discount rate) by avoiding those health effects and the damage of climate change, and it would do this for a compliance cost of only $4 billion in 2020.

The three main parts are:

1. Set a different carbon emission rate for each individual state. This avoids imposing a one-size-fits-all approach. The baseline rate for coal generation would be 1,500 lbs of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour versus 1,000 for natural gas generation. The final rate for an individual state would be a blend between those two baselines determined by its mix of coal and natural gas power generation. (For example, a state that now gets 90 percent of its fossil fuel electricity from coal and 10 percent from gas would be required to hit a rate of 1450 lbs per megawatt hour.) This would be an overall emission rate for the state, meaning individual plants could emit at higher or lower levels. The allowable emission rate would drop again in 2025.

2. Allow plants an array of tools for meeting their emission rate. Each plant or company could then decide which mix tools works best for particular circumstances. For example, an individual plant could improve its boiler technology or retrofit with carbon sequestration — assuming, that is, the latter becomes commercially viable. Owners of multiple plants could coordinate running times, or build in more natural gas or renewable capacity to average out to the overall target. Low- or zero-emitting sources would earn generators credits that could then be traded between companies, within states, or even across state lines among states that allow it — essentially creating a kind of cap-and-trade system under the auspices of the EPA rather than an act of Congress.

3. Allow energy efficiency to also earn credits. Qualifying efficiency programs run by the states could also earn credits, which generators could then purchase to give themselves added leeway. Increased efficiency would lower costs for consumers and businesses and thus cut demand. To qualify, these energy efficiency programs would have to meet rigorous standards laid out in NRDC’s report.

If states can demonstrate that an alternative approach from the EPA’s model — say, California’s new cap-and-trade system — will deliver equal or better results, they’ll be free to pursue that.

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On Monday, President Obama is expected to nominate Gina McCarthy to replace outgoing Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson.

Widely known as Obama’s “green quarterback,” McCarthy has helped shape landmark mercury and air toxics standards, along with greenhouse gas regulations, as the current head of the Office of Air and Radiation. In addition to serving at the EPA, she also worked under two Republican governors, including Mitt Romney. McCarthy helped implement strict standards slashing carbon and mercury pollution from the state’s “filthy five” coal-fired power plants when she served in Massachusetts.

Over her two-decade career, McCarthy has drawn unusual praise from Republican and energy industry admirers — a tough feat at an agency that is often the polluters and their allies’ favorite target.

1. GOP Connecticut Governor Rell:
Rell appointed McCarthy to lead Connecticut’s Department of Environmental Protection. ‘I have said all along that Connecticut’s next DEP commissioner must be a person of unquestioned vision, leadership and commitment to the environment,’ Rell said in a statement. ‘Gina has an outstanding record of accomplishment on key environmental issues.’”

2. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK):
Inhofe supported a temporary hold on her confirmation in 2009. Even so, he eventually embraced her confirmation (granted, the climate denier Senator hoped the EPA would chart a different, more polluter-friendly course). “I supported Regina McCarthy’s nomination today because I think she possesses the knowledge, experience, and temperament to oversee a very important office at EPA,” Inhofe said in a statement.

3. House Environment and the Economy Subcommittee Chairman John Shimkus (R-IL): Shimkus is a sharp critic of the EPA, but praised how the air chief navigated the EPA’s cross-state air pollution rule. “She was helpful in allowing that project,” Shimkus told E&E News. “It showed me, personally, some willingness to understand capital investment and assumption of risk.”

4. Former Senator George Voinovich (R-OH):
During McCarthy’s first confirmation hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator Voinovich of Ohio said, “Ms. McCarthy brings over twenty years of experience as an environmental regulator at the local and state level. I know those experiences are going to serve her well in the new capacity. I’m comforted by the fact that you have state experience and as a result of that I think we’ll have a better understanding of how…what the implications are…of the decisions you are going to be making on ordinary folks out in the states.”

5. Reagan EPA Official And Steel Industry Representative:
“‘At EPA, as a regulator, you’re always asking people to do things they don’t want to do,” said Charles Warren, a top EPA official in the Reagan administration who now represents industries, such as steel companies. “But Gina’s made an effort to reach out to industries while they’re developing regulations. She has a good reputation.”
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