U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the highest ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, may try to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon dioxide pollution from any non-mobile sources, such as factories, power plants and oil refineries, for at least one year.
Late last week, Murkowski began circulating an amendment she hopes to attach to the $32.1 billion appropriations bill the Senate is currently debating, which includes funding for the EPA, the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Forest Service.
The amendment would prohibit the EPA from spending any federal funds "to regulate or control carbon dioxide from any sources other than a mobile source" or to treat the greenhouse gas as a pollutant subject to federal regulation until after the fiscal year ending September 10, 2010. It also would delay federal action on climate change just when the world's nations are on the brink of negotiating a new international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow global warming, a move that could weaken the United States' influence during the talks.
Environmentalists are up in arms, charging Murkowski with trying to undermine major climate-change legislation currently pending in the Senate, and to circumvent the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that expressly gave the EPA authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. Thirty-two leading environmental groups co-signed a letter urging every U.S. senator to oppose the Murkowski amendment "as well as any other amendments that would delay America’s investments in clean energy and efforts to tackle global warming."
“At a time when we should be doing everything we can to shift to a clean energy economy, Senator Murkowski’s amendment lets Big Oil, dirty coal, and other big polluters off the hook for their carbon dioxide emissions, undermining protections for public health and the environment,” said Emily Figdor, Global Warming Program Director for Environment Director, in a statement.
A Murkowski spokesman told The Washington Independent that the senator is seeking bipartisan support for her proposed amendment and would decide by the middle of this week whether to introduce it. The spokesman said Murkowski is not trying to permanently block federal action to curb climate change; she just wants to postpone it long enough to give Congress more time to pass legislation that will balance economic and environmental priorities.
“Sen. Murkowski is not seeking to derail or delay congressional action on climate change,” the spokesman said. “She simply wants adequate time for the legislative process to work in order to avoid enacting a law that could have devastating unintended consequences on the economy.”
Ironically, Murkowski knows full well the impact climate change is having on her home state and the urgency of addressing those changes. In her closing keynote at the Arctic Forum in May 2006, she observed:
"While differences of opinion on [climate change and other critical issues] remain, one area that I believe we cannot lose focus on is the human dimension. Our policies of today, and our policies of tomorrow, have a direct impact on those who live in the Arctic region . . .
"It has been . . . 14 years since the U.S. last developed an Arctic policy.
"The world was a different place fourteen years ago. The Cold War had just ended. Climate change was barely being considered as an issue. An accessible, navigable Arctic Ocean was nowhere near as real a prospect as it is today. The Arctic Council was just getting started. And we had nowhere near the sensitivity to the changes life is bringing to indigenous residents.
"When I visit the Native villages in northern Alaska, I ask the village elders what climate change means to them. They don’t speak about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or attempt to debunk the now infamous hockey stick theory.
"They tell me what they have personally observed over the years. Native whaling captains tell me that the ice pack is less stable, and that there is more open water requiring them to travel greater distances to hunt. The snow pack is coming later and melting earlier than in years past. Salmon are showing up in subsistence nets in greater numbers across the arctic. Different types of vegetation now grow where they never grew before. The migratory patterns of animals have changed. Warmer, drier air, has allowed the voracious spruce bark beetle to migrate north, moving through our forests in the south-central part of the state. At last count, over three million acres of forest land has been devastated by the beetle, providing dry fuel for outbreaks of enormous wild fires. To give you some perspective, that is almost the size of Connecticut.
"Times have changed and we need a new Arctic policy. But how do we craft it?"
Back in 2006, Senator Murkowski was asking important questions, and her current desire for legislation that would strike a sustainable balance between the economy and the environment is laudable, but delaying federal action on climate change for another year and hamstringing the EPA so that it is powerless to address the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions are not strategies that will help us find the answers to these pressing problems.
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Comments
Desde Argentina a la Senadora Murkouski con todo respeto le pregunto “¿tiene Usted hijos o nietos?
¿Pensó en ellos? ¿ellos viven en otro planeta?
¿Para que sirve una economia sólida sin ciudadanos con buena salud?.
Mi mas respetuoso saludo.
Severo: Those are all good questions IF higher CO2 levels were an important element in the environment. But they’re not. “Global Warming” has been changed to “Climate Change” because they were obviously wrong about the warming. Now they leave it as an unspecified, frightening “change”. And they’re wrong about that, too, but they know fear will motivate us to do some pretty stupid things.