Cochran & Wicker Vote to Limit EPA Global Warming Regulatory Power

Press Release

U.S. Senators Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) today voted to support Senate passage of a resolution to limit the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to arbitrarily impose greenhouse gas regulations while Congress continues to craft global climate change legislation.

Cochran and Wicker both cosponsored a resolution of disapproval (S.J.Res.26) that expressed the Senate's opposition to allowing the EPA to implement regulations to control carbon dioxide emissions and would have put a hold on EPA work on such regulations. The measure, which failed on a 47-53 procedural vote, was authored by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). It required a simple 51-vote majority to advance.

"The EPA's endangerment finding and the regulations it will generate puts a single federal agency on track to regulating virtually every aspect of our economy, including agriculture, construction, manufacturing, energy production and small businesses. I believe it amounts to allowing the EPA to take a heavy-handed approach to climate change that will result in unnecessarily expensive compliance costs," Cochran said.

"I supported Senator Murkowski's effort for two basic reasons. First, I strongly feel that any policy changes concerning energy and global warming should be taken by elected representatives in Congress. Second, the actions of the EPA would have severely damaged our economy, putting at risk the jobs and quality of life for millions of American families," Wicker said.

On the basis of a 2007 Supreme Court ruling, the EPA late last year issued an "endangerment finding" that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health, giving the agency the ability to use the Clean Air Act to regulate those gases--and energy-using businesses that produce them--as pollutants.

Despite requests from members of Congress, the EPA has not produced any economic cost analysis of the impact of the proposed global warming regulations.

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