POLICY
The Biden Administration’s Emerging Environmental Overreach: WHAT THE ADMINISTRATION LACKS IN RESTRAINT ON THE CLIMATE AGENDA IT MAKES UP FOR IN BRAZENNESS.
By: Chris Horner (Attorney and Member of the Board of Directors, Government Accountability & Oversight, P.C.)
A
mid an “Earth Day” lineup of sometimes curious political events, President Biden unilaterally pledged to double the United States’ climate promises under the doomed Paris Agreement, to which he recently re-committed the U.S. by using his pen-and-phone. This vow of massive emissions reductions came even as data showed that the economic lockdown of 2020, to which the U.S. contributed the greatest reductions globally, left us still not yet on track to meet President Obama’s first 2016 five-year plan under Paris. Once again, it turns out the government program “just wasn’t big enough” for it to really work. Putting aside the glaring, if neglected, concerns inherent in such unilateral commitments by a U.S. president, consider the implications of knowing that the self-harm imposed in the name of fighting COVID-19 was not nearly enough. Biden’s plan makes lockdown-size contractions a required annual pursuit, not something to merely resume but to repeat and compound it annually, year over year. The administration offered little comfort when it also subtly admitted the harm this plan will cause by threatening trade sanctions against other countries who choose not to also do this to themselves. So, although this agenda supposedly will unleash an economic boom, it is unfair to us if the rest of the world does not participate? An April Financial Times headline helps sort through the obvious contradiction: “EU Industry Calls for Urgent Carbon Border Tax as Prices Soar.” Apparently, GHG rationing regulations in Europe, which is much further down this regulatory path, “are a gift to rivals, say companies.” Little noticed are the President’s confessions, which partly take the form of massive
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new spending, or “investments,” that the technology to meet the law does not exist. There should be no doubt in the oil and gas community whether the Biden administration is coming after it, and in a way that will make the previous campaign, including the “war on coal,” appear measured. As Politico reported on the “Biden’s climate all-star” team of policy sages, “their goal is decarbonizing the country. Jane Flegal, the senior director for industrial emissions at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, says, “The assumption is that climate isn’t just aligned with the economic agenda, it is the economic agenda.” This is somehow the case even though every 2020 U.S. Senate sponsor of the Green New Deal boldly voted “present” when their convictions were put to the test in a Senate vote. Some jobs, it seems, are worth protecting — namely, their own. Clearly, what the administration has shown it lacks in restraint on the climate agenda it makes up for in brazenness. For example, this unprecedented subservience of economic well-being to political demands will proceed with little input from Congress outside of approving more spending. The actual restrictions to bind the U.S. economy to an agenda which no Congress has ever endorsed, and plainly will not endorse any time soon, are going to come through regulatory backdoors and a troubling use of the Department of Justice to target opponents. Regarding the former, one threat uncovered by chance in an open records request contains the worst elements of Washington: bureaucrats cycling in and out of office, collusion with ideological activists and, when democracy slams the front door shut, they seek out and find a backdoor “sue-and-settle” resolution. What’s now clear is that their proposed
method of circumventing Congress is an exceptionally complex, hidden regulatory scheme, though air-quality experts in the shale industries might see through the smoke and mirrors. What Biden’s people hatched prior to his election is a secondary National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for ozone, “robust” enough to serve as a regime for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Rather than applying the law, it invents an aspirational way around the law. This effectively requires setting an acceptable U.S. level of this globally “well-mixed” gas, of which China is far and away the largest emitter, and the U.S. a marginal contributor when considering nature’s own bounty. We can’t control CO2 concentrations or meet CO2 or GHG NAAQS — even where requiring it is deemed legal. We can, however, do great harm to the economy, communities and people by pretending we can by fundamentally transforming the Clean Air Act into an unrecognizable and never-intended framework for economy-wide decarbonization. Naturally, the plan to exclude the people’s voice and enable governmental overreach came about because of past legislative and judicial rejections. Public records recently uncovered show it was developed over months between progressive state attorneys general and former career U.S. EPA attorneys, and other staff, now turned environmental activists. This was first revealed in records obtained from the attorneys general (AGs) by Energy Policy Advocates. For the group, I filed an amicus curiae brief in the D.C. Circuit federal court of appeals, laying these facts out in a lawsuit filed by these AGs the day before Biden’s inauguration, State of New York et al. v. Environmental Protection Agency, et al. Among the points made: Biden’s EPA official in
