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EPA Won't Act on Emissions This Year
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But broader concerns over the regulatory "domino effect" that would be caused by any endangerment finding were expressed by members of the National Economic Council, the Council on Environmental Quality, and officials such as OMB general counsel Jeffrey A. Rosen and Cheney energy adviser F. Chase Hutto III, several meeting participants said.
One said that Rosen asked at one meeting if carbon dioxide emissions from a tailpipe could be treated differently than those from a power plant, wondering if the molecules are different. The answer was that they are not.
Hutto, a former Cato Institute intern and Bush campaign volunteer during the Florida vote recount in 2000, whose grandfather patented at least seven piston inventions for the Ford Motor Company, has "an anti-regulatory philosophy and concern about what regulation means for the American way of life. He would talk, for example, about not wanting greenhouse gas controls to do away with the large American automobile," said the meeting participant.
A spokeswoman for Cheney's office said Hutto had expressed opinions at the interagency meetings, but she declined to discuss what they were.
By late November, Johnson had held a meeting with his staff at which he advocated finding a danger to public welfare and praised the agency's technical supporting document as "excellent." But when Burnett sent the proposal to the White House, the OMB staff refused to open it, and it sat in limbo for months.
Instead, the Bush administration supported legislation to tighten fuel-economy standards, but by less than the EPA had been considering.
Then, on March 27, Johnson returned to the EPA's fifth-floor conference room to inform his staff that he would abandon the idea of drafting a formal rule and would instead call for the "advanced notice," which only invited comment on possible regulation. This would avoid "any unintended consequences" that could stem from a broad rule curbing carbon dioxide, he said.
"I know some people are going to say we're kicking the can down the road," Johnson said as he faced a group of angry career officials. But he said that was not the case.
Staff researchers Julie Tate and Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
