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With the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set to finally enact stricter air pollution standards in accordance with the Clean Air Act and two subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decisions requiring them to do so, powerful Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are working to make sure that the new standards never see the light of day. The specific measures being targeted are the EPA’s new standards for carbon emissions from power plant smoke stacks.

Fred Upton (R-MI), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, along with Republicans Joe Barton (TX) and Ed Whitfield (KY) sent a letter last week to the White House, demanding that the Obama administration take action to stop the EPA from regulating carbon emissions from power plants.

From their letter:

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Republican Congressman Ed Whitfield from Kentucky, who serves as Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power, has made it clear that he will do everything in his power to push several bills that will strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its ability to protect the public from pollution spewing from utility plants. Whitfield joins the chorus of Republicans and industry leaders who claim that emission standards are too costly for businesses and, as a result, will cost the economy desperately needed jobs.

The specific rule that Whitfield is working to repeal involves standards that would require utilities to install devices to capture as much CO2 as possible from industrial boilers and waste incinerators, a move the EPA estimates would prevent thousands of premature deaths from heart attacks and respiratory illnesses every year. The American Petroleum Institute successfully lobbied the EPA in April to postpone the rule until the public and industry leaders had a chance to air their concerns, which the EPA will be receiving until July 15th. Whitfield is hoping that new legislation will kill the proposal once and for all.

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On Tuesday, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives moved one step closer to passing a bill to permanently prevent the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating global warming pollution. The House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the bill, H.R. 910 or the “Energy Tax Prevention Act,” in a vote that fell mostly along party lines.

Under the guise of lowering gas prices, the bill would deliver several very lethal blows to EPA efforts to address climate change — and to President Obama’s energy agenda — by:

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Remember reading about those Soviet-era show trials where politics and everything BUT the facts were actually discussed? Well on February 9th, the Koch brothers and Exxon Mobil are paying for a show trial of their own.

On Wednesday at 9:30 am, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Energy and Power will hold a hearing to examine legislation (see memo [pdf])aiming to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from curbing global warming pollution from stationary sources (power plants, factories, etc.). The bill “HR __, The Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011” was proposed last week by self-anointed “manmade climate change” skeptic (see video below) and Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), with the help of Subcommittee Chair Ed Whitfield (R-KY) and well-known climate skeptic Senator James Inhofe (R-OK).

The Centre for American Progress Action Fund (CAP) has a brilliant backgrounder [pdf] on the hearing describing how polluter friendly support in the Committee on Energy and Commerce, primarily on the Republican side, has been paid for by Koch Industries and their partners in polluting the planet. CAP shows that during the 2010 election cycle, the Kochs and their employees gave $279,500 to 22 Republicans on the Committee and $32,000 to five of its Democrats.

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Rep. Joe Barton, already implicated in an effort to mislead Congress about the science of climate change, is obviously choosing offence as his best possible defence, renewing his slander of Penn State climate scientist and “Hockey Stick” author Dr. Michael Mann.

As then-co-chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Barton was responsible in 2006 for inviting the increasingly controversial statistician Edward Wegman to prepare a critique of Mann’s iconic hockey-stick-shaped graph illustrating a 1,000-year climate reconstruction. Although Barton has denied that he had a previous relationship with Wegman, implying that the subsequent report and hearing were not a set-up, John Mashey has documented the extensive direction that Barton provided to Wegman through Barton staff member Peter Spencer.

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(They deniers seem oblivious to the fact that Mann's work has been thoroughly peer-reviewed and approved by a number of studies, most recently by the US  National Research Council.  They also seem not to understand that even if Mann's work were proved to be fatally flawed, it is only the latest of many scientifically approved studies that prove we humans, by our burning of coal and oil, are trashing the planet.)