Will EPA Regulate Carbon Emissions in Absence of Climate Law?

Given that I’ve been on deadline this week, I admit that it wasn’t until yesterday evening on the commute home that I heard the piece on NPR. The long and the short of it? The EPA can regulate carbon emissions if Congress fails to pass climate legislation this fall. “And nobody wants the government to regulate carbon emissions,” said the voice on the radio.

Here’s a good brief synopsis from Pro Farmer, an industry newsletter for, well, professional farmers.

Congressional sources confirm what we have suspected for some time – that the Senate will not likely complete action on controversial climate-change legislation this year. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) acknowledged a climate bill could wait until 2010 and said that senators will “push climate as hard and as fast as we can.” Some observers think the controversial topic could not pass in an election year. With the likely delay, attention is turning to what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will do to regulated greenhouse gases in the absence of a new law.

In April, the EPA followed through with the Supreme Court’s 2007 directive to determine whether carbon dioxide is a threat to human health and welfare. The agency’s finding that it is a threat is expected to be finalized this fall. The EPA would then be required to begin the process of regulating emissions from a several sources.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), author of the Senate’s climate-change bill, said If Congress does nothing, “we will be watching EPA do our job, because they must under the Clean Air Act.” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said that she, and the rest of the Obama administration, would prefer not to regulate, as the Clean Air Act was not designed to regulate carbon dioxide and a Congress-passed cap-and-trade bill would better address both environmental and economic concerns. White House officials and climate-change bill proponents have used the threat of EPA regulation to push Congress toward action.

I guess all that press about the big bad EPA had some sort of impact on Congress, or public opinion, or both, because this morning the New York Times came out with a story entitled: “Senate Draft of Climate Legislation Makes Unofficial Debut”.

Others tried to decipher new provisions ranging from strengthened U.S. EPA authority to altered carbon offset language.

Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) are not releasing the official version of their major climate legislation in the Senate until today, but advocates on the right and left already are making their thoughts known about a preliminary 801-page draft (pdf) of the bill leaked to E&E yesterday.

I haven’t read the 801-page draft (available by way of link from the NYT story) but I may scan it tonite given that I’ve had terrible trouble sleeping lately. And I’d probably like to ferret out the section that brought the NYT writer to this conclusion:

The preliminary draft of the Senate climate bill gives EPA a wider berth to set limits on greenhouse gas emissions, even in the event that a federal cap-and-trade plan takes effect.