E.P.A. Chief Defends His Decision on California

NY Times
January 25, 2008

By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON — Defending his refusal to let California set limits on the greenhouse gas emissions of automobiles, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency insisted before a Senate committee Thursday that climate change posed no “compelling and extraordinary” risk to the state.

Describing such change as “not unique to” and “not exclusive to California,” the agency’s administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, called it “a global problem requiring a global solution or, at least at a minimum, a national solution.”

But internal agency documents cited by members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works listed climate change effects specific to California, including wildfires and species loss.

Fifteen states have signed on to follow California’s lead in regulating automobile emissions, and the governors of three of them — Maryland, Pennsylvania and Vermont — testified before the committee Thursday that attacking the problem was essential for their residents and the world as a whole.

The states are suing to overturn Mr. Johnson’s decision last year to deny California a waiver from the federal Clean Air Act that would allow the emission regulation. It is the only state allowed by the act to apply for such exemptions.

California has used previous waivers to require automobile makers to reduce emissions of smog, a locally severe pollutant. Over the years, other states, many with large urban areas, have adopted California’s program, and the Environmental Protection Agency has adopted many of the changes as national policy.

Mr. Johnson argued that the newly revised federal standard for vehicle fuel efficiency — signed into law a few hours before he announced his intention to deny California’s waiver — was a better approach to reducing auto emissions because it was more uniform.

Appearing before the committee, Mr. Johnson was confronted with a hostile panel of senators, most of them Democrats. The only Republican present, Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, questioned whether human activity was an important cause of global warming and disputed the idea that there was a consensus among scientists that this was the case.

The chairwoman of the committee, Senator Barbara Boxer of California, has been in a dispute with the environmental agency over access to its records, to determine whether Mr. Johnson overruled his staff in blocking state action on global warming.

Mr. Johnson said he could not recall whether the briefing papers prepared by his staff had included a recommendation. He denied having been pressured by the White House to protect the car industry.

The E.P.A. has said that since it was in litigation with the states, it had the right to protect its internal deliberations with its own lawyers.

Mrs. Boxer said her staff had been allowed to review the documents and write down what they said, as agency staff members watched over their shoulders.

One read, “California continues to have compelling and extraordinary conditions in general (geography, climatic, human and motor vehicle populations — many such conditions are vulnerable to climate change conditions) as confirmed by several recent E.P.A. decisions.”

That point is crucial if the agency’s stated reason for denying California a role in controlling automobile emissions of heat-trapping gases is that the state has no local stake in climate change.

Mrs. Boxer announced that she would introduce legislation to grant California its waiver.

“If the administration will not work for responsible federal action in this regard,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, a committee member and the author of a global warming bill, “I believe at the very least it should stay out of the road that many state governments are taking for real forward-looking action to protect our citizens from global warming.”

Doug Haaland, a staff member for the Republican caucus in the lower house of the California Legislature, told the committee that the 16 states, which represent roughly half the country’s automobile market, were trying a “bank shot around Washington’s perceived inability to take action.”