Isramart: Senate Rejects Republican Effort to Thwart Carbon Limits

Isra-Mart news:
WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday defeated a Republican-led effort to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from curbing greenhouse gases as lawmakers road-tested arguments for a future fight over climate change legislation.

The Senate voted 53-47 to reject an attempt by Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, to block the E.P.A. from imposing new limits on carbon emissions based on its 2009 finding that such gases from industry, vehicles and other sources represent a threat to human health and the environment.

Ms. Murkowski and others, including six Democrats, contended that the E.P.A. was engaging in a bureaucratic power grab and usurping Congressional authority with regulations that would stifle the economy and kill jobs.

“The sweeping powers being pursued by the E.P.A. are the worst possible option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Ms. Murkowski, who tried to thwart the agency’s action using a rarely employed procedure called a resolution of disapproval.

The resolution of disapproval, created in a 1996 law, is a vehicle to allow Congress to overturn an executive branch action and is not subject to filibuster in the Senate. It is seldom used, however, due to the likelihood of a veto.

Democratic opponents of the Murkowski proposal said its backers were protecting oil companies and other industrial interests at the expense of public welfare and were ignoring science that substantiated the hazards of greenhouse gas emissions. They said Ms. Murkowski and her allies wanted to prevent the E.P.A. from taking action while simultaneously stalling Congressional action, essentially protecting the status quo.

“This is about delay in changes in our energy policy,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who said many of Ms. Murkowski’s allies “want nothing to do with comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation. What they want is the E.P.A. to go away.”

The fight was mainly symbolic because the prospects for the resolution were bleak even had the Senate passed it. It would have then required a majority vote in the House and the approval of President Obama, who has already threatened to veto it.

But it provided a showcase for a Senate fight over global warming as well as an indicator of where lawmakers could be expected to come down on legislation aimed at carbon emissions. The near-even division among lawmakers showed that a 60-vote supermajority on climate change legislation remains elusive.

Senate leaders and the White House are continuing to explore whether to push energy legislation on the Senate floor before the midterm elections this November. Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, was meeting Thursday afternoon with the chairmen of the committees with jurisdiction over energy issues to plot strategy.

Leading Democrats see the threat of E.P.A. action as an effective way to keep pressure on Congress to consider energy legislation and as a ready alternative if the House and Senate are not able to come to terms on an energy measure.

Supporters of the plan to block the E.P.A. said they were trying to stop a backdoor attempt by the Obama administration to regulate carbon emissions without waiting for Congress to weigh in. They said the E.P.A. approach would produce little environmental reward while putting the United States at a severe disadvantage to nations that were not imposing such controls on their own industries.

“It would be stupid for us to do this now when the rest of the world is not coming along at all,” said Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma. “Even if it is the right thing to do, now is not the time to do it.”

Though Mr. Coburn said the case for global warming is not settled science, several other Republicans said they accepted the scientific assessment that climate change is occurring. They said their main reason for trying to rein in the E.P.A. was concern over handing such far-reaching regulatory power on emissions to an executive agency.

Given that several backers of Ms. Murkowski’s plan said they believed climate change was a reality, senators advocating a broad energy approach that would try to address global warming said defeat of the plan to strip the E.P.A. of regulatory authority over greenhouse gases should provide momentum to their legislative efforts.

“Climate change is happening,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut who is a sponsoring a main climate change bill with Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts. “The science is convincing and the current pattern of energy consumption is just making a bad problem worse.”