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The Substitute - Climate Change Legislation Looks Dead. Can The EPA Handle The Job?

By Bradford Plumer

A Closer Look At The EPA OptionIt was always going to be tricky for Congress to pass a big climate-change bill this year. And now, post-Scott Brown, the odds are looking even bleaker. A lot of panicky Dems are blanching at the thought of another knockdown legislative brawl before the midterms, and there's even been talk of a smaller "energy-only" bill that would dish out subsidies for various technologies but wouldn't set hard limits on greenhouse gases. Cap-and-trade still has its backers in the Senate, but picking up 60 votes looks increasingly daunting.

So is that it? If the Senate falters, is the country out of options for cutting carbon pollution? Not exactly. There's still the Environmental Protection Agency. Recall that, back in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA was required to regulate greenhouse gases under the existing Clean Air Act if it found those gases posed a threat to public health and welfare (which, most scientists agree, they do). The Bush administration put off making that call, but Obama's EPA head, Lisa Jackson, went ahead last year with a formal endangerment finding. The agency is already using its power to draft new fuel-economy rules for cars and light trucks. The next step will be to start regulating stationary sources like power plants and factories, a task that's much more fraught.

For a long time, no one thought it would come to this. The Clean Air Act, after all, was designed to handle conventional air pollutants like lead or sulfur-dioxide. Using it to address global warming would be clunkier than a climate bill specially crafted by Congress. If anything, the EPA option was mainly seen as a spur to stubborn lawmakers: Surely they'd work to pass their own climate legislation, so that the agency didn't have to crack down with rules that polluters were really going to hate. As Arkansas Democrat Mark Pryor put it last year, "I've always been reluctant on cap-and-trade, but [the EPA's authority] might put that in a different light."

But now that climate legislation is floating in limbo, things are looking different. The EPA really might end up being the last resort for reining in greenhouse gases. Which means it’s time to ask: Can the agency actually handle the job?

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