EPA Won't Act on Emissions This Year

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, said yesterday, "If this administration spent the same effort fighting global warming as they do editing and censoring global warming documents, the planet might not be in such dire straits."

Markey, whose staff was allowed to review the Dec. 5 EPA document but not to keep a copy, called the White House's reaction to its own experts' opinions "distressing and unjust."

White House spokesman Tony Fratto declined to discuss the administration's decision-making but disputed the assertion that "we are trying to drag our feet." He said regulating is "a long process" and it is wrong to assert that it "could be done quickly and easily" in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision. "The EPA has worked diligently to try to get this done," he added.

EPA spokesman Jonathan Shradar said: "You don't just wake up one day and say, 'Here's the decision.' It's a long process with lots of thought, lots of analysis and lots of research that gets you to that decision point." When the EPA releases its notice today, he said, "We're going to be more transparent than we've been, laying it all out and saying, 'How should we do this?' "

The full story of how the finding of public endangerment and Bush's promised greenhouse regulations got sidetracked is still not known. Participants have not disclosed, for example, which White House official ordered an EPA deputy associate administrator to withdraw the finding last December after it was transmitted by e-mail to Dudley's office. An official said the person involved was "more senior than the head of OMB," but declined to be more precise.

The idea of instituting complex new controls on emissions by cars, ships, aircraft, power plants, factories and office buildings was never greeted warmly by any senior Bush appointees, but officials said that after the Supreme Court's slap they divided into roughly two groups: those who felt that regulating under the Clean Air Act was unavoidable, reasonable and best done under Bush; and those who wished to sidestep the law and press for its eventual modification after delay and public debate.

In the former camp, at least initially, was EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson, a career official who previously oversaw pesticide regulations, and much of the agency's senior ranks. After the court ruling, in Massachusetts et al. v. Environmental Protection Agency et al.,"people were bouncing back and forth into each other's offices, saying, 'Can you believe this? Look at this decision; look at the language; this is so strong,' " recalled one agency official, who like the others asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. "People thought, 'We are going to move forward and do the right thing.' "

Within a week, Johnson met with roughly 20 officials in the EPA's fifth-floor conference room and said they would undertake a major effort to meet the court's demand. Despite what one participant described as resistance from Cheney's office and other opponents of regulation, Bush signed an executive order on May 14, 2007, directing the EPA to work with the Transportation, Energy and Agriculture departments to "take the first steps toward regulations" to reduce the nation's gas usage by 20 percent over the next decade.

The agency subsequently spent $5.3 million on contractors and solicited 500 comments from government experts on the technical underpinning for a formal finding that man-made global warming caused dangers; the question was, to what? Officials said some advocated saying that it endangered both human welfare and health, instead of just welfare; while others -- reflecting broad utility and coal industry concerns -- argued that invoking health would lead more quickly to costly regulation of carbon dioxide emissions by power plants as well as cars.

In a late October briefing, Johnson's staff warned him against leaving out health risks, noting in a PowerPoint presentation that doing so "creates potential for confusion, criticism, suspicion -- e.g., is EPA downplaying public health risks and/or ignoring the science of climate change, in order to avoid doing more?"

But Johnson, seconded by top deputies such as then-Deputy Associate Administrator Jason Burnett, decided he could sidestep the health issue. "The idea was to cabin it off to 'welfare,' " a former EPA official said. "There was a general feeling that you wanted to limit the findings as much as you could."

Even within the EPA, the details of how much auto emissions should be limited provoked fierce arguments. Some officials began carrying around copies of Bush's executive order, waving it while arguing with senior political appointees.