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President Obama’s smog policy gamble holds uncertain political payoff
The surprise White House decision Friday to shelve tougher smog regulations may not allow President Obama to breathe easier politically.
While Obama nixed plans that Republicans alleged would be a costly brake on job growth and the GOP praised the decision, the opposition party quickly signaled that the decision won’t change the thrust of the right’s attacks against other pieces of the White House’s green agenda.
Republicans remain poised to hammer the White House on the economy with weeks of House votes this fall to delay or scuttle other Environmental Protection Agency rules that Republicans and business groups call “job-killing.”
Green activists, meanwhile, were demoralized by the decision to overrule an EPA plan to toughen Bush-era smog standards — a rulemaking that was two years in the making and one EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said would bring major public health gains.
Daniel J. Weiss of the Center for American Progress Action Fund — a liberal group with deep ties to the White House — said the decision won’t slow attacks on Obama from the right.
“The idea that this would appease Big Oil and other special interests who are against public health protections is incorrect,” he said Friday afternoon.
“The reality is, as we have seen for a long time, one cannot appease the special interest and the Republicans who are trying to destroy the administration.”
The smog rule was the most expensive of the seven pending federal regulations, with estimated economic costs of more than $1 billion that the White House identified in letter to Boehner earlier in the week.
The EPA had estimated that the most stringent ozone standard in the range under review could cost up to $90 billion annually in 2020. The same analysis projected health benefits as high as $100 billion annually through reduced asthma and other respiratory ailments, avoided hospital visits and other benefits.
Kevin Book, an analyst with the consulting firm ClearView Energy Partners, believes Obama’s ozone decision could be politically helpful to the White House.
“The first thing the Obama administration gains is the ability to say, ‘Look, I identified the most expensive regulation and I eliminated it,’” Book said.
“He is never going to get Republican votes for loosening environmental standards, but he could get independent votes by showing flexibility on fiscal issues,” Book said.
But the White House retreat on the ozone battered a green movement that’s already getting less than it hoped for under the Obama administration, despite wins on increased vehicle efficiency and some other policies.
In particular, some activists are warning that the White House risks sapping enthusiasm among young and green-minded voters who vigorously backed Obama in 2008.
The ozone decision coincides with protests outside the White House by green activists dismayed that the administration may approve a major pipeline to expand U.S. imports of Canadian oil sands. The administration took a major step toward signing off on the project late last month.
Organizers say 1,000 people have been arrested thus far in two weeks of demonstrations calling for the administration to block the Keystone XL pipeline.
Daniel Kessler of the Rainforest Action Network, who is helping coordinate the demonstrations, said the ozone decision has quickly influenced the event.
He said the number of people who plan to be arrested Saturday, the final day of the demonstrations, jumped to 300 in part over the decision to shelve the smog rule.
The Friday ozone decision came hours after new federal statistics showed no net gain in job growth last month, and it was announced a week before Obama will give a speech to Congress laying out his jobs agenda.
White House officials, for their part, insisted that the smog decision had nothing to do with politics. The administration is vowing to reconsider the ozone rules in 2013, an action they said will enable a review based on updated science.
“Work is already under way to update a 2006 review of the science that will result in the reconsideration of the ozone standard in 2013,” Obama said Friday in a news release. “Ultimately, I did not support asking state and local governments to begin implementing a new standard that will soon be reconsidered.”
White House officials also pushed back against suggestions that they folded under immense and very public pressure from industry groups that said the rule would hinder economic recovery — a line of political attack aimed at Obama’s vulnerability amid stubborn 9 percent unemployment.
White House officials broke the news to environmental group leaders they summoned to the White House on Friday morning.
The White House is trying to limit the political fallout on its left flank by vowing to defend a host of other EPA rules that are in the GOP’s crosshairs, such as upcoming utility air toxics standards.
Paul Bledsoe, a senior adviser at the Bipartisan Policy Center who often works on energy matters, said the unemployment rate makes the White House sensitive to the political and economic effects of environmental rules.
But he cautioned against viewing the ozone decision as a larger statement about how the White House will handle other regulations, noting the complexities and difficulties inherent in revising the ozone rule, which affects scores of localities nationwide.
“I think this is an exceptional rule and it would be a mistake to take it as a proxy for the administration’s view on environmental regulation,” Bledsoe said, noting that the administration is acting “robustly” to address power plant mercury and other pollutants that threaten public health.
Obama’s decision to overrule the EPA is nonetheless a victory for an array of major business groups — such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute — that took their case against the ozone rule directly to White House chief of staff Bill Daley.
National Association of Manufacturers CEO Jay Timmons praised the ozone retreat as “the right move to protect jobs.”
But his statement Friday also previewed continued industry attacks on other EPA policies, including upcoming rules setting maximum achievable control technology (MACT) standards for air toxics from industrial boilers and power plants.
“Manufacturers still face a great deal of uncertainty from regulations looming on the horizon, including the Boiler MACT rule, the Utility MACT rule, the National Labor Relations Board’s ‘ambush elections’ rule and a slew of others that will hamper our ability to grow and compete,” Timmons said. “We urge the Administration to apply the same approach to these other burdensome regulations that it did when deciding to forgo the discretionary ozone standard.”
The Sierra Club’s Michael Brune, in response to the ozone decision, countered that “a healthy economy requires clean air and healthy people, and these protections from smog would have improved our communities and saved billions of dollars in health costs.”
