EPA regulatory relief act
ATTEMPTING TO DEFUND, LIMIT THE EPA
The first chance that the bloc of 85 freshman Republicans had to influence environmental policy was with H.R. 1, the bill that would fund the federal government for fiscal year 2011. The House passed a 27 percent budget cut for the EPA, which, had it passed the Senate, would have been the agency’s largest cut since 1981.
“We were trying to tell our brothers on the Republican side that they’re never going to get this through the Senate, but they were posturing,” said Norm Dicks, a Democrat, and the former ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee. “They wanted to make the cuts. They thought they were going to win political points with the Tea Party-types for cutting the EPA budget.”
Lawmakers also attempted other cuts by proposing 162 amendments, 22 of which would have cut EPA programs or limited the government’s enforcement of environmental regulations and its ability to study climate change. However, H.R. 1 never became law because the House and Senate were not able to reach a budget compromise until April 2011, when H.R. 1473 narrowly avoided a government shutdown. After negotiations with the Senate, the two houses agreed on a 15.6 percent cut, the largest enacted cut since the EPA lost 16 percent of its budget in 1986. RR
The 22 amendments proposed in H.R. 1 signaled how this group of freshmen Republicans, and pledge-signers, wanted to limit the EPA and climate-change research.Think Progress, a liberal blog, researched climate change statements by members of the 112th Congress, and found many members of Congress were doubtful of climate-change science.The Investigative Reporting Workshop matched the Think Progress statements with the list of members of Congress who signed the pledge from Nov. 16, 2010, and found 17 of the 20 Senators who had signed the pledge said they doubted climate change science, as did 78 of the 156 representatives who had signed the pledge.
Throughout the House's debate on H.R. 1, several pledge signers proposed amendments that would limit government regulation of climate change.
Rep. Mike Pompeo, a Republican who represents the Kansas district where Koch Industries is headquartered, and is a signer of the No Climate Tax Pledge, received $10,000 from Koch Industries PAC in the 2010 election.
Once in the House, Pompeo proposed an amendment to H.R. 1 to cut $8.5 million, or roughly half the fiscal year 2010 budget, from the EPA’s greenhouse gas reporting program. Pompeo said at the time, “This data is the very foundation of the EPA's effort to pursue its radical anti-jobs agenda.”
Another amendment was proposed by Republican Rep. John Carter of Texas, who wanted to ban using money to enforce a rule on cement manufacturing emissions. He was one of the first representatives to sign the No Climate Tax Pledge. Carter and two other Texas Republicans proposed an amendment that would have prohibited the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases emitting from stationary sources, such as factories.
Republican Rep. Ralph Hall of Texas, also in that first group of representatives to sign the pledge, sponsored an amendment — which passed — to stop the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from creating a National Climate Service, which was intended to be “a one-stop shop” for climate information.
Republican Rep. Morgan Griffith of Virginia sponsored an amendment — which passed — that stopped funds for EPA guidelines on surface coal mining operations.
Republican Rep. Kristi Noem of South Dakota signed the pledge in 2010 and received $5,000 from KochPAC. She sponsored an amendment — which passed — to prohibit money from being used to change the air quality standards regarding coarse particulate matter (dust).
However, neither these amendments nor the bill survived in the Senate.
Many of the 85 freshman Republicans sponsored bills in the House to limit the EPA’s regulatory power or to expand oil and natural gas drilling. Koch Industries Public Sector LLC, the lobbying arm of Koch Industries, lobbied for H.R. 910, the Energy Tax Prevention Act, which would have rolled back the Supreme Court’s ruling that the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases.The bill was sponsored by Republican Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan and co-signed by 92 Republicans (and three Democrats), 61 of whom also signed the pledge. Had it passed, the Energy Climate Prevention Act would have prevented the EPA from defining greenhouse gases as air pollutants and prohibited all federal research or programs on climate change research.
In June 2011, Rep. Griffith of Virginiaalso introduced the EPA Regulatory Relief Act, which would have allowed companies to ignore future EPA rules on industrial boiler and heater emissions while delaying the implementation of any rules that would constitute the “least burdensome regulatory alternative.” The bill eventually gained 101 Republican and 25 Democratic co-sponsors, 67 of whom signed the No Climate Tax Pledge.
Griffith said he signed the No Climate Tax pledge because he believes national limits on greenhouse-gas emissions harm Virginia’s coal industry and the jobs it provides. He said he didn’t feel any pressure to sign the pledge from Americans for Prosperity, which he credits with helping him win a seat in Congress in 2010 by campaigning against the policies of his Democratic predecessor, Rick Boucher.
Griffith also said that the $5,000 his campaign received from Koch Industries in June 2010 had no influence on his decision to sign the pledge less than two weeks later. Opposing President Obama’s “war on the coal industry” was a top issue during his campaign, he said.
“When I was running in early 2010, this was already on my agenda,” Griffith said. “I was talking about these things long before I even knew that the Koch brothers and AFP were involved in these issues.”
The pledge isn't limited to those in Washington. Among other office-holders who signed it is Oklahoma Schools Superintendent Janet Barresi, who declined to talk about her reasons for signing the pledge in August 2010. But through her press secretary, Barresi said in statement that the school district relies on property taxes from power plants and oil and gas production.
"Oklahoma's schools depend on revenue from fossil fuels, and the destructive power of a tax on these fuels is not justified by questionable science," Barresi said in the statement.
Contributing: Julia Broemmel