CLIMATE: Prominent EPA skeptic prepares to vote against anti-agency measure (04/06/2011)

Jean Chemnick, E&E reporter

His efforts to delay implementation of U.S. EPA's climate change rules may not have endeared Sen. Jay Rockefeller to environmentalists. But the West Virginia Democrat is the only member of his state's congressional delegation who is set to vote against permanently scrapping EPA's power to limit carbon.

Both the Senate and House are likely to hold votes today on legislation to bar EPA from implementing rules related to carbon dioxide, and West Virginia's junior senator and three House members have all co-sponsored those bills.

The Senate will vote on an amendment to an unrelated bill, offered by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) from language authored by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.). Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is the only Senate Democrat to co-sponsor the Inhofe bill (S. 482), though he has said he plans to also support Rockefeller's alternative measure (S. 231) to halt implementation of rules for power plants and other stationary sources for two years.
"I'm going to continue to keep voting until we get these regulatory agencies in the proper place they're supposed to be, which is basically working with the legislature, which passes public policy," Manchin said last week. "Not them making public policy."

But Rockefeller has said he will not support the Inhofe bill -- in part because he does not believe it can become law, but also because he opposes the policy.

In a floor speech last week, Rockefeller acknowledged that EPA is "is the object of much scorn" in West Virginia, where the coal industry plays a leading role in both the state's heritage and its economy -- providing 58,820 jobs directly and indirectly last year.
The agency is resented in the Mountain State not only for proposing to regulate carbon dioxide but for a range of other permitting rules and regulations related to both mining and coal-fired electric generation.

Still, Rockefeller said that taking EPA regulation of carbon off the table permanently would hurt the coal industry in the long run by removing an immediate incentive to invest aggressively in carbon-reduction technologies.
"We know that if coal is frozen in time the way Senators McConnell and Inhofe are proposing, it will be rapidly eclipsed by other energy sources," he said. "Oh yes, most especially natural gas."

Rockefeller said that without the certainty that carbon will be regulated in the future, coal-fired power plants might not make upgrade and investment decisions that would prepare them for a future that very likely will include a price on carbon -- like investment in carbon capture and sequestration technologies.

"Electric utilities are right now making, as I've indicated, investment decisions based on that uncertainty," he said. "It's a bad place from which to make a decision, and with very few exceptions, logically, that means they are not building or rebuilding coal-power plants. Natural gas will overtake."

Rockefeller's aversion to a permanent ban on EPA climate change rules puts him at odds not only with his West Virginia colleagues but also with many in the coal industry. But it is unclear whether that parting of ways will have any political implications for the senior senator, who will not be running for re-election until 2014, when he will be 77 years old.
Mark Blankenship, a West Virginia pollster with clients in the coal industry, said the defeat last year of Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) demonstrates that West Virginia voters have very little tolerance for equivocation when it comes to EPA climate regulations, even from their most senior representatives. Mollohan voted against a comprehensive climate change bill that passed the House in 2009, but he did not come out as strongly against it as some of his home-state colleagues.

Blankenship also noted that President Obama's approval ratings in West Virginia are lower than the national average, in part because he is perceived as an aggressive regulator.
"Rockefeller has got to balance his allegiance to the Obama administration with popular opinion in West Virginia," he said.

"The politically popular choice is to go with the McConnell amendment," he added.
But Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), who is a co-sponsor of the House version of the permanent EPA bill, said Rockefeller runs little political risk by voting against it.
"It won't hurt him," Rahall said. "The senator's looking at it from the perspective of what can pass and what can become law."

Rahall acknowledged that the permanent pre-emption bill does not have great prospects of becoming law but said he thought it was worth supporting anyway."I'd like to see something get to conference," Rahall said. "[Rockefeller's] two-year bill just might be the end result here if we can't get a permanent moratorium 'cause obviously the president would not sign it. Then let's get a bill to conference."

Coal industry representatives said they supported permanent pre-emption of EPA rules because only that would offer coal-fired electric generation long-term certainty.
"We have differences of opinion with the senator over the utility of temporary suspension of EPA greenhouse gas authority versus a permanent annulment of that authority," said Luke Popovich, chief spokesman for the National Mining Association. "He obviously believes that the former is the wiser course. We tend to view a permanent ban as being the real elixir here because it would remove any uncertainty in the marketplace."