EPA chief says carbon rules won’t be a ‘shock to the system’

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson said over the weekend that upcoming climate regulations are modest in scope, comments that come amid Capitol Hill efforts to scuttle the rules.

EPA is set to begin regulating greenhouse gases from power plants and other large emissions sources in 2011, but vows to phase in the requirements slowly and shield small businesses.

“They [the rules] will be modest, each and every one, because business needs time to understand the regulations that are coming at them. There won’t be any huge shocks to the system,” Jackson told National Public Radio in an interview broadcast Sunday.

Some Capitol Hill lawmakers hope to derail EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions; regulations also face court challenges. Critics of the regulations allege they will harm the economy, while defenders call the fears overblown and say the rules are needed to help slow global warming.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), an ally of his state’s coal industry, has said that Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has promised him a vote this year on his bill to block EPA rules governing stationary emissions sources for two years. Opponents have also eyed appropriations bills for riders to scuttle EPA’s authority.

Jackson also said she remains hopeful Congress will return to climate legislation.

The House approved a sweeping plan in mid-2009. But a climate bill is widely considered dead in the Senate this year after Democratic leaders — facing opposition from Republicans and centrist Democrats — abandoned the measure before the August break.

“I think there has been a lot of work done over the past months to re-establish that man-made changes to the climate are happening,” Jackson said. “As we move past the Climate-Gate era, and I think we are, my hope is that Congress will come back to think about that question once again.”

Climate-Gate refers to e-mails among prominent climate scientists that were made public after being hacked from a U.K. research institute late last year.

Climate skeptics said the messages showed the researchers were cooking the data to back the notion of a warming planet. But multiple probes have cleared the scientists of manipulating data.