In both last week’s and this week’s Cornwall Alliance Newsletters we informed you that votes were pending in the House and Senate on a variety of bipartisan measures to prohibit, delay, or restrict EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gases. We also published a news advisory on the subject.
The House is now scheduled to vote today on H.R. 910, the Energy Tax Prevention Act, which would prohibit all EPA regulation of greenhouse gases with respect to climate change, though a number of pending amendments could delay the vote until tomorrow.
The Senate is now scheduled to vote on the McConnell Amendment (the Senate version of the House’s Energy Tax Prevention Act, S. 482) to S. 493 after 4 p.m. today. Watchers predict it will receive 51 to 52 votes. Also scheduled for vote after 4 today are three weaker amendments to delay or restrict EPA regulations of greenhouse gases, each of which seems likely to receive 15 to 30 votes.
According to Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, National Spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance, “The bi-partisan support for these measures reveals the sense of Congress that EPA’s regulating carbon dioxide threatens the Constitutional separation of powers.”
Following the failure of cap-and-trade legislation in the last Congress after the scientific case for dangerous manmade global warming collapsed, the Administration turned to the EPA to do what Congress refused to do. It thus put unaccountable bureaucrats in charge of enforcing the most intrusive regulations ever imposed on the American economy.
“The potential damage from EPA regulation of carbon dioxide emissions is enormous,” Beisner said. “Energy prices would skyrocket, driving up costs for food, shelter, transportation, and everything else consumers need. Businesses would face dramatic permitting costs, and employment would plummet. Those are bad enough in themselves, but the most frightful effect would be that the power of an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy would multiply exponentially.”
America’s poor especially need protection from EPA GHG regulation, Beisner explained. “Since the poor, who spend a higher percentage of their income on energy than others, will be hurt more by rising energy costs, the large price increases that would follow amount to a regressive tax—hurting most of all the people who can least afford it.”
