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Obama to Face New Foes In Global Warming Fight
2010-11-04 08:26:16.921 GMT
By JOHN M. BRODER
Nov. 4 (New York Times) -- WASHINGTON -- The Obama
administration and the new Congress appear headed for early
confrontations over the reach of environmental regulation and
federal subsidies for fossil fuel development.
The administration is moving determinedly forward on a
series of actions to limit emissions of greenhouse gases and
other air pollutants, to restrict some coal mining practices and
to eliminate multibillion-dollar tax breaks for the oil and gas
industry.
Those initiatives have already generated bipartisan
objections in both houses of Congress, and the numbers in
opposition grew with Tuesday's voting. Many of the newly elected
members have expressed skepticism about the existence of global
warming and say they strongly oppose government action to combat
it.
The presumptive new Republican speaker of the House, John A.
Boehner of Ohio, has dismissed the idea that carbon dioxide is
affecting the climate and has characterized cap and trade and
other proposed solutions to global warming as job-killing energy
taxes.
He and other Republican leaders in both houses, along with
many Democrats and a number of state attorneys general, support
measures to block the Environmental Protection Agency from
regulating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, as it plans
to do starting in January.
They will find fervent and well-financed support from
business interests that fear the effect of such regulation on
their cost of doing business. John Engler, the former Republican
governor of Michigan and now president of the National
Association of Manufacturers, said on Wednesday that the new
Congress should assert stronger control over E.P.A., which, as he
put it, "is getting way outside its authority in trying to
regulate that which cannot pass in the legislative process."
Mr. Obama has clearly narrowed his ambitions on
environmental and energy policy, scrapping any hope of enacting
comprehensive legislation to deal with climate change and the
nation's dependence on imported oil. He said he was not seeking
confrontation with Congress over regulation of greenhouse gases.
"Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was
not the only way" Mr. Obama said in his press conference
Wednesday. "And I'm going to be looking for other means to
address this problem. And I think the E.P.A. wants help from the
legislature on this. I don't think that, you know, the desire is
to somehow be protective of their powers here. I think what they
want to do is make sure that the issue's being dealt with."
Instead of seeking a broad approach to energy and climate
change, Mr. Obama said, he would look for smaller policy bites
that could attract Republican support. He said he hoped to
generate wide support in the new Congress for further development
of electric vehicles, for converting some of the nation's heavy
truck fleet to run on natural gas, for incentives for energy
efficiency in buildings and appliances, and for more emphasis on
renewable energy and nuclear power. He said such programs lead to
innovation and can create thousands of jobs.
Tuesday's voting offered a brutal verdict for many of those
members of the House who had voted for the cap-and-trade approach
that Mr. Obama has now abandoned. Some three dozen House
Democrats who supported the 2009 climate bill were turned out of
office.
Supporters of the measure, sponsored by Democratic
Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J.
Markey of Massachusetts, noted that more than half of the 43
Democrats who voted against the measure also lost their seats,
meaning that for most voters the election was not simply a
referendum on the climate bill.
Even as voters in many states were issuing a rebuke to
lawmakers who supported climate change legislation in Washington,
the people of California, as is their custom, were moving in a
different direction. They soundly defeated Proposition 23, an
oil-industry-sponsored measure to gut the state's landmark global
warming law that will set strict limits on greenhouse gas
emissions and create a trading system for pollution permits.
California voters also re-elected the Democrat Barbara Boxer
to the Senate and returned a Democrat, Jerry Brown, to the
governor's office -- both strong supporters of state and federal
action on climate change.
A coalition of unions, environmental groups, Silicon Valley
investors and people in the clean energy industry raised $25
million to defeat Proposition 23, which was written and financed
by out-of-state oil companies.
Thomas F. Steyer, a San Francisco hedge fund billionaire who
served as co-chairman of the group that campaigned against the
proposition, said the nation would follow California's lead.
"When it comes to huge, significant change, the history of
the United States is that it does not come from Washington,
D.C.," Mr. Steyer said. "It comes from people outside the
capital, people much closer to the real world, who force change
gradually, bit by bit. A change in this nation's energy economy
is inevitable. The question is, how soon?"
-0- Nov/04/2010 08:26 GMT
