On Thursday, the inevitable happened, and the House voted largely along party lines to strip the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of its ability to protect the public from industrial sources of greenhouse gases.   However, the Senate has slammed the brakes on this effort for the time being.

The “Energy Tax Prevention Act” (which, it should be noted, would not prevent a tax nor have anything to do with taxes if enacted) seeks to overturn an EPA endangerment finding (which was ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007) that legally compels the EPA to protect the public’s health and well-being under the Clean Air Act.  The GOP-run House proved their allegiance to corporate polluters over peer-reviewed science by ignoring the well founded public health and climate dangers greenhouse gases present.  While they were at it, they defeated an amendment offered by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) that would have put the House on record as accepting that climate change is occurring and is largely being caused by humans, a claim a large majority of scientists has accepted as truth for a long time.

Despite the Republicans' irresponsible action, the public’s health is safe for now.  A similar bill died in the Senate the day before, ten votes short of passing, making yesterday’s House vote merely a theater of the absurd.  Even better news came out of the Senate during Friday afternoon’s 11th hour budget negotiations when Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill) announced that riders to the budget that would accomplish the same goal as the failed bill would not be included in any compromise to keep the government running.

While nothing is certain in this budget crisis, Durbin's announcement is a major defeat for Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) and his corporate cronies.  Instead, the EPA may have to submit to a study of the economic impacts of greenhouse gas regulation (similar to one profiled in a previous blog post), which is hardly warranted but far better than the alternative.