IN DECLARING Monday that climate change threatens Americans’ well-being, the Environmental Protection Agency served a vital purpose, even if the agency never sets a hard limit on emissions from coal-fired power plants or gas-guzzling cars. The EPA action will instead put pressure on the Senate to pass the more flexible cap-and-trade system of regulating carbon pollution - an approach that was approved by the House last summer but has bogged down as critics tarred it as just another tax.
Any crackdown by the EPA on carbon-dioxide emitters would be a top-down mandate forcing every big polluter to use the best available carbon-reduction technology any time it wants to expand a plant or build a new one. The legislation before the Senate, on the other hand, would put an overall cap on pollution and let the greenest companies sell pollution credits to firms that find it more difficult to clean up. This more entrepreneurial cap-and-trade approach worked well in curbing the smokestack pollutants that cause acid rain, and many business leaders have expressed support for it.
But industries that would be most affected by any policy to reduce carbon emissions, such as coal, natural gas, and oil, are still fighting cap-and-trade. The House bill won by a margin of just seven, and it is not at all clear that the Senate version will win enough votes from rust-belt and oil-patch Democrats to command the 60 votes needed to avoid a Republican filibuster.
This is where Monday’s EPA ruling could come in handy. The specter of the EPA requiring - by administrative fiat - that power plant owners use carbon-capture and storage technology on any new or expanded fossil-fuel plant would quickly make the owners see the advantage of a gentler, more market-oriented system.
Although George W. Bush promised during the 2000 campaign to regulate carbon dioxide, he broke that pledge within weeks of taking office. His eight years of inaction on climate change made the United States, which trails only China as an emitter of greenhouse gases, a latecomer to the issue. Now the EPA ruling sends a message to both polluters in America and the nations gathered in Denmark: President Obama is determined to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, one way or another.
