Republicans were in an “Internet uproar” last week over a false report that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson had called them “jack-booted thugs.” Meanwhile, deeply troubling statements that EPA officials did make have hardly stirred a ripple in the blogosphere.

At a recent hearing before a House oversight panel, three Obama administration witnesses — National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Administrator David Strickland, EPA Assistant Air Administrator Gina McCarthy, and EPA Transportation and Air Quality Director Margo Oge – denied under oath that motor vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards are “related to” fuel economy standards. In so doing, they denied plain facts they must know to be true. They lied to Congress.

House Government Oversight and Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) put it more diplomatically: “Your statements under oath misrepresented the relationship between regulating greenhouse gases and regulating fuel economy.” By “obstinately insisting” that regulating greenhouse gases and fuel economy are “separate and unrelated endeavors,” the officials “impede the Committee’s important oversight work.”

Why did they “misrepresent” and “impede”? Had the officials answered truthfully, they would have to admit that California’s greenhouse gas motor vehicle emissions law, AB 1493, which EPA approved in June 2009, violates the Energy Policy Conservation Act’s (EPCA) express preemption of state laws or regulations “related to” fuel economy. The officials would also have to admit that EPA is effectively regulating fuel economy, a function outside the scope of its statutory authority.

Strongly Related

That greenhouse gas emission standards implicitly regulate fuel economy is evident from the agencies’ own documents. As EPA and NHTSA acknowledge in their joint May 2010 Greenhouse Gas/Fuel Economy Tailpipe Rule (pp. 25424, 25327), no commercially available technologies exist to capture or filter out carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from motor vehicles. Consequently, the only way to decrease grams of CO2 per mile is to reduce fuel consumption per mile — that is, increase fuel economy. Carbon dioxide constitutes 94.9% of vehicular greenhouse gas emissions, and “there is a single pool of technologies… that reduce fuel consumption and thereby CO2 emissions as well.”

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Cap-and-tax may be dead in Congress but the Kyoto agenda of stealth energy taxes marches on at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Although the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970, years before global warming was a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, and even though the statute says nothing about greenhouse gases (GHGs), EPA is now ‘legislating’ climate policy through the regulatory backdoor.

Today, a congressional panel will hold a hearing on legislation — the “Energy Tax Prevention Act” – to stop EPA’s power grab.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), prohibits EPA from using the Clean Air Act to ‘enact’ costly controls on GHGs such as carbon dioxide (CO₂), the inescapable byproduct of the fossil fuels that provide 85 percent of our total energy supply.

EPA acknowledges that regulating GHGs via the Clean Air Act (CAA) leads to “absurd results” inimical to congressional intent. For example, EPA would have to extend CAA pre-construction and operating permit requirements, intended solely for large industrial facilities, to literally millions of non-industrial facilities such as office buildings, big box stores, and restaurants.

To avoid an administrative morass that would both paralyze environmental enforcement and freeze economic development, EPA decided to “tailor” – that is, amend – the statute’s numeric definitions of “major emitting facility” to exclude all but the largest GHG emitters from CAA permitting requirements.

But such “tailoring” only compounds the constitutional crisis created by EPA’s attempt to dictate climate policy to the nation.

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This week (March 3, 2010) was the deadline Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) set for Mark Crisson, President and CEO of the American Public Power Association (APPA), to explain why APPA is urging Senators to support Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s Congressional Review Act resolution to veto the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. The Senate may vote on the Murkowski resolution as soon as next week.

Now, aside from the merits of the issue, which I’ll get into in a moment, Waxman and Markey’s behavior is out of line. Waxman and Markey (W/M) are Members of the House of Representatives. What business is it of theirs if the APPA lobbies Senators about a bill pending in the Senate? Senators can conduct their own inquiries without any assistance from W/M. And why didn’t W/M copy Sen. Murkowski or at least Senate Energy Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) on their Feb. 25 letter to Mr. Crisson? Failure to “cc” any of the principals in the Senate flouts one of the most basic rules of legislative courtesy.

Besides being busybodies, Waxman and Markey are bullies.

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