The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday declared carbon blamed for global warming a public health threat, paving the way to regulate the emissions for the first time.

Administrator Lisa Jackson said that the agency was “now authorized and obligated to make reasonable efforts” to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

“These long-overdue findings cement 2009’s place in history as the year when the United States government began addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution,” she told a news conference.

The announcement came on the first day of a major climate conference in Copenhagen that aims to forge a new global deal on fighting global warming.

Jackson hit back at conservative critics who question the science behind climate change, saying there was “overwhelming evidence” pointing to global warming.

The agency said it was classifying six greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide along with methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride—as public health threats under the U.S. Clean Air Act.

Jackson said that the agency was not immediately imposing new regulations but that the finding would allow it to finalize emissions standards for light-duty vehicles.

President Obama’s administration took the step as Congress debates the first-ever system to restrict carbon emissions, with most Republicans fighting the legislation.

Jackson said that the Obama administration still believed it was important that the legislation go ahead, as such laws would affect the entire economy.

“I don’t want anyone coming out of here believing it’s an either/or,” she said.  (link)

 President Obama is pledging a provisional target for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, the first time in more than a decade that an American administration has offered even a tentative promise to reduce production of climate-altering gases, the White House announced on Wednesday.

At the international climate summit in Copenhagen next month, Mr. Obama will tell the delegates that the United States intends to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions “in the range of” 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, officials said, reflecting the targets specified by legislation that passed the House in June but is stalled in the Senate. Congress has never enacted legislation that includes firm emissions limits or ratified an international global warming agreement with binding targets.

Mr. Obama will travel to the United Nations talks to deliver the promise in hopes of spurring significant progress at the summit. He will appear on Dec. 9, near the beginning of the 12-day session, on his way to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Dec. 10, officials said.

By making the pledge in an international forum, Mr. Obama is laying a bet that Congress will complete action on a climate bill next year with roughly the same targets and will be prepared to ratify an international agreement based on the commitment.

But White House officials acknowledged that those outcomes are uncertain. They will depend in large measure on whether the Democratic sponsors of the climate legislation can win enough votes to pass it and whether major developing nations, notably China and India, deliver credible emissions reduction pledges of their own.

Mr. Obama, who had not previously committed to making an appearance at the climate summit, had been under considerable pressure from other world leaders and environmental advocates to make the trip as a statement of American seriousness about the climate change negotiations.

Mr. Obama has spoken to leaders of China and India about their energy and climate change programs in recent days, but neither has made public its carbon-reduction plans. China has given hints that it may announce a reduction in energy use relative to economic growth, or “carbon intensity,” before the Copenhagen conference opens.

“Obviously we hope other major economies will put forth ambitious action plans of their own,” Carol Browner, the president’s senior adviser for energy and climate change, said at a White House briefing Wednesday morning.

Mr. Obama takes little risk in appearing briefly at the Copenhagen conference because he and other world leaders punctured expectations for the session 10 days ago in a side meeting of leaders of Pacific nations.

The leaders agreed that they would work at Copenhagen toward an interim political declaration on climate change that stops short of a binding international treaty. Delegates are expected to pledge to complete work on a treaty next year.

Mr. Obama came to office promising to end eight years of relative inaction on climate change under the Bush administration, but the fact that Congress has not yet acted on climate change has limited the administration’s ability to negotiate with other nations.

Many foreign leaders, particularly those in European nations that have been much more aggressive in dealing with climate change, have become increasingly critical of Mr. Obama’s seeming passivity on the issue. The White House appears to hope that the announcement of the targets and the trip to Copenhagen will quiet some of the dissension and help Mr. Obama reestablish American leadership on what he calls one of the signature issues of the time.

Mr. Obama said recently that he would attend the session if his presence could help lead to a successful outcome. It is significant that he will appear at the beginning rather than at the end of the 12-day meeting. Most major decisions at such environmental talks come in the closing days.

Andreas Carlgren, the Swedish environment minister, said that Mr. Obama had now raised expectations for the Copenhagen talks, but he expressed a note of disappointment about the timing of his visit. He said he hoped Mr. Obama would come in the final days of negotiations, when dozens of other heads of government are planning to arrive.

It was unclear what effect Mr. Obama’s promise of domestic emissions reductions will have on the slow progress of climate legislation through Congress. Until now, the administration’s negotiators have said they would not get ahead of Congress in making promises in an international forum, but Mr. Obama has now essentially adopted the targets of a climate and energy bill that passed the House in June.

The House bill aims at greenhouse gas reductions of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and sharper cuts in the following decades employing a cap-and-trade system that includes most of the nation’s major sources of carbon dioxide emissions. Last month, a Senate committee passed a measure calling for a 20 percent cut by 2020, but that is expected to be weakened as the legislation moves through other Senate committees and onto the floor, perhaps next spring.

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, the co-sponsor of the Senate legislation, said he believed the president’s actions would give a boost to the Copenhagen talks and help move the Senate bill. He called the decision to declare an American target a “game-changer” domestically and internationally.

“By announcing a provisional target, contingent on the support of Congress, the President has defined a path to an international agreement that challenges the developed and developing nations to fulfill their obligations,” he said. “It lays the groundwork for a broad political consensus at Copenhagen that will strip climate obstructionists here at home of their most persistent charge, that the United States shouldn’t act if other countries won’t join with us.”

Senator James Inhofe, the Senate’s most outspoken skeptic on climate change, said that Mr. Obama’s public pledge would do little to speed an international agreement and foolishly prejudged the outcome of a Senate debate that has barely started.

He said that Senate climate legislation is “dying on the vine” and that the Senate would never ratify a treaty that did not require strong emissions reductions from major developing countries.

“The U.S. Senate has made clear on numerous occasions that unilateral action by the United States is unacceptable, because it will harm our economy and have virtually no effect on climate change,” said Mr. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican.

José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, appeared to give only lukewarm approval to Mr. Obama’s decision to spend a day in Copenhagen at the beginning of the conference rather than commit to attend during the culmination of the two-week event when the pressure is expected to grow on leaders to seal a strong agreement.

“I have made clear that we need as many world leaders present as possible,” Mr. Barroso said in a brief statement to the media. “I hope that others will follow suit,” he said.

The White House also announced that several cabinet secretaries will speak at the Copenhagen conference to explain actions the United States is taking to address global warming and to urge other nations to step up their efforts.

Among those who will be dispatched to speak in the early days of the Copenhagen conference are Lisa Jackson, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator; Steven Chu, the secretary of energy; Ken Salazar, secretary of interior; Gary Locke, commerce secretary; and Tom Vilsack, secretary of agriculture.

Ms. Browner and Nancy Sutley, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, will also represent the United States at the talks, the White House said.

This will be Obama’s second trip to Denmark this year. He made short trip to Copenhagen on Oct. 2 to make an unsuccessful pitch to the International Olympic Committee for Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.  (link)

On Tuesday, hearings start in the Senate’s finance and energy committees for the ambitious, threatened, and nominally Republican-endorsed Kerry-Boxer climate bill. Even supporters say the odds of passing climate legislation in the Senate aren’t great, with Democrats divided and Republicans arrayed against it. But some take hope from the House’s passage of a similar bill this summer, and the possibility of dangling the possibility of domestic oil drilling and nuclear-power subsidies to entice skeptical lawmakers. Here are the predictions of how this could this play out, along with a few climate legislation advocates’ criticism and suggestions for the process:

• Previous House Passage Will Help Washington Post domestic policy blogger Ezra Klein thinks that “[t]he fact that the House passed the bill and the president is ready to sign a bill means that it’s really only the Senate standing in the way of serious legislation to address global warming, and that’s not a position the Senate particularly wants to be in.” Aside from this pressure in cap and trade’s favor, he suspects it is “easier” for senators “to write legislation when they can sell their efforts as improving what the House has already done. After all, conservative Democrats can say, you don’t want that bill, do you?” Thus, while he’s “not saying that cap and trade has great odds this year … whatever chance it does have is a function of Pelosi passing it back in June.”

• Focus on Cost and Trade “At the risk of stating the obvious,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Keith Johnson, “the climate bill isn’t going to live or die on its environmental cred–but rather on its cost.” By cost, Johnson means cost to “consumers, businesses, and the economy as a whole.” That means, for example, a focus on trade, which will be particularly problematic: “Ten Democratic senators have said they can’t support a climate bill that doesn’t shield U.S. manufacturers from ‘unfair’ foreign competition,” for example by including carbon tariffs. Carbon tariffs, Johnson notes, were already included in the House bill but have not sat well with “the White House, the UN, and plenty of foreign governments … The jury is still out on whether carbon tariffs violate World Trade Organization rules.”

• Cap and Trade Not Happening–Try Plan B Energy expert Robert Shapiro thinks it “clear that the Senate will not enact Kerry-Boxer or any other cap-and-trade system this year.” Writing in the National Journal, he responds to the question of whether the energy and climate parts of the bill should be split up to facilitate passage: “In politics, it’s usually better to take a half loaf than none; but since the other half of this loaf is the most important part, it comes down to whether climate reforms can pass without energy reforms.” In his advice to those serious about this legislation, he proposes a “Plan B”:

[T]he hard truth is that Congress is very unlikely to ever pass a cap-and-trade system. One reason is that economists have pointed out how a cap-and-trade system inevitably makes energy prices much more volatile, as it has in Europe … businesses won’t undertake the huge investments required to develop more climate-friendly fuels and technologies unless they can project their returns based on a stable price for carbon … The first priority, therefore, should be to open up the debate to a “Plan B” that doesn’t have cap-and-trade’s serious drawbacks. Let’s start with what has worked well in Scandinavia–a carbon-based tax, but one in which we also protect the economy by recycling the revenues in other forms of tax relief. If we can get that debate going, we may not have to pick and choose between climate and energy reforms.

• Bill Will Be Fine Larry Schweiger, President and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, is more optimistic. “In the House,” he observes, “the American Clean Energy & Security Act got more Republican support than the health insurance reform bill and economic recovery package combined. That was despite a massive campaign against it led by major polluters.”

• Bill Isn’t that Great Anyway Echoing sentiments expressed more loudly by pair of EPA lawyers in the Washington Post, Bill Snape of the Center for Biological Diversity argues that the bills under consideration have serious problems. “It isn’t victory merely because the President signs a bill that says ‘climate’ (or ‘energy’) in it,” he reminds environmental activists.

Even the Kerry-Boxer climate bill that passed out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has several debilitating flaws: first it does not set science-based pollution reduction standards (i.e., anything remotely close to 350 or even 450 ppm of CO2), second it does not aggressively go after methane reductions despite the technological ability to do so today at basically no cost, and third it waives the very portion of the Clean Air Act (i.e., the National Ambient Air Quality Standards or NAAQS) that could actually provide the tool to achieve science-based standards in a familiar way to various levels of government.  (link)

Who gets to spew carbon dioxide into the air for free, and who has to pay for the right?

The first draft of the Senate version of the climate change bill left a number of unanswered questions, including the much-discussed allocation of pollution permits under a carbon-pricing plan. Exactly which industries will get pollution permits has been a hot topic among senators who haven’t decided how they’re going to vote. The fence-sitters got the information they were waiting for late Friday, when Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) released her “chairman’s mark.” The mark is the version of the bill that Boxer wants the committee to use as a baseline when it considers the legislation, which is cosponsored by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.)

Boxer’s Environment and Public Works Committee will begin hearings on the bill on Tuesday with testimony from a panel of top officials: EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff. Hearings will continue nearly all day on Wednesday and Thursday, and the President will weigh in, too, with a major speech on Friday and another planned for Tuesday. But Boxer’s “mark” sets the stage for what everyone will be talking about.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit allocation in the new version is very similar to the House bill. (The new bill and supporting documents are all posted on the EPW site.) The easiest way to think about the distributions is that they assign a value to all the carbon emitted in the US, which would be broken down into permits. Each permit has a monetary value, and it also represents a specific amount of carbon that can be emitted. Emitters will need to acquire those permits, either by purchasing them or receiving a free allocation, but other entities are also given permits that they can sell on the market and make use of the proceeds.

As in the House bill, the Senate version gives local electric distribution companies (LDCs) 30 percent of the distributed allowances, and will be required to pass the value of those credits to consumers in order to protect them from any resulting energy price spikes, likely through rebates. Groups like the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, the national organization that represents the state boards that regulate LDCs, have advocated for providing a large portion of the credits to distributors, arguing that they can best protect consumers from increased costs.

A significant portion of the value of credits is distributed to energy distributors other than LDCs, with the goal of protecting their customers from energy price increases. Five percent will go to merchant coal generators and electricity providers with long-term power purchase agreements. Natural gas distribution companies get 9 percent, home heating oil users get 1.5 percent, and rural electric co-ops get 0.5 percent of allocations. Those free allocations will phase out between 2026 and 2030.

There’s also a direct rebate program, used to offset the costs for the most vulnerable households. Fifteen percent of allocations will be sold off to polluters in the early years of the program, with the proceeds going to low- and moderate -income households through rebates to offset price increases. Later in the program, the direct rebate program expands, with more than 50 percent of credits auctioned starting in 2035 and proceeds distributed to all energy consumers. This is the approach that advocates for low- and moderate-income families have called for, like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The direct-to-consumer rebate both protects people from price spikes, and it creates an incentive to reduce energy use (whereas, with LDC allocations, consumers wouldn’t see the rate increase and thus have less of an incentive to reduce use).

Like the House bill, the Senate legislation also includes protections for industries that both use a lot of energy and must compete with other countries, like steel, paper, and cement. They get 4 percent of the allowances in the first years, scaling up to 15 percent in 2014. Oil refiners will receive 2.25 percent of allowances in the initial years. Electric utilities will receive allowances to help pay for the cost of installing and operating carbon-capture-and-storage technology. And states also receive a portion of the distributed allowances in the first two years, to use for purchasing renewable energy and investing in energy efficiency, and another portion will be used to support research into advanced energy technologies.

The bill also includes funding for international adaptation, to help countries who will feel the direct impacts of climate change, and funding to provide clean energy technology for developing countries. These provisions are seen as key in helping secure an international agreement, as they will provide incentives for developing countries to join in. Through 2025, 5 percent of allowance value will be devoted to preventing tropical deforestation. Through 2021, 2 percent of allowance value will be allocated for international adaptation and clean technology transfer, which increases to 8 percent after 2027.

There are also allocations for clean transportation technology, agriculture and forestry carbon reduction programs, state emission reduction programs, natural resource protection, deforestation prevention, and worker training programs. Those allocations are intended to support programs that compliment the cap on carbon.  (link)