EPA chief, previewing 2011 battles, strikes back at House GOP critics

Here’s a sneak preview of the coming battles between the GOP-run House and the Environmental Protection Agency:

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) Monday that his attacks on the costs of Clean Air Act rules are way off base.

“EPA’s common-sense steps to implement the Clean Air Act result in much greater economic value than cost to Americans,” she wrote in a letter to Barton, the top Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Her comments come in response to Barton’s October letter that said agency rules — including several with a price tag exceeding $1 billion — will impose onerous costs on various industries and harm the economy.

But Barton — who took aim at proposed ozone standards, requirements for industrial boilers and other rules — is not providing the whole picture, Jackson writes. She notes that his claims, and a chart he included with his letter, fail to consider benefits that far outweigh costs.

“Those benefits projections can be found in the same documents from which the cost projections were drawn,” Jackson writes. “Had the chart included the benefits projections, readers of it would have [been] able to see that the projected benefits of EPA's pollution reduction rules under the Clean Air Act exceed the projected costs by 13 to 1.”

Expect more of this in the days ahead. Barton hopes to chair the powerful Energy and Commerce panel when the GOP takes over next year, although he faces a tough battle to win the gavel. He has vowed to quickly launch probes of EPA regulations. 

Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), a top candidate to run the committee, also has EPA in the crosshairs.