U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., is taking exception to a new Biden administration rule that she says is designed to kill more energy jobs.
The new rules announced last week by the White House Office of Management and Budget directs federal agencies to consider the “social cost of greenhouse gases” metrics when purchasing any goods or services, conducting the environmental review process for projects of all kinds, and levying climate penalties against private businesses.
Capito, ranking member of the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, said the plan is flawed and will drive up energy costs for average Americans while killing more jobs in the process.
“The Biden administration continues to use unproven figures to attempt to justify its environmental policies that drive up costs for families, hamstring American employers, and delay job-creating infrastructure projects from ever moving forward,” Capito said.
Capito said the new rules are another example of top-down government mandates that are intended to kill energy jobs and make the United States more reliant on foreign countries.
“The problem is the math doesn’t add up, and in fact, doesn’t exist,” she said. “I’ve asked the administration repeatedly for details, proof points, and facts on where its Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases numbers come from and how they’re using them, and they’ve chosen to move forward anyway with overreaching, broad directives with no regard for transparency, public input, or impacts on millions of Americans.”
The veteran West Virginia lawmaker has been fighting the so-called “social cost” rules on greenhouse gases for several years now.
In February of 2021, Capito asked Biden to postpone efforts to set interim cost values on the social cost of greenhouse gases, but the administration ignored the request from Capito and other Republican lawmakers.
The following June Capito asked for an extension of the public comment period into the plan, but that request was denied by the administration as well. In November of 2021, she asked the Biden administration’s “Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases” to improve transparency in its activities. It was her fourth request for transparency on the issue.
In July she and U.S. Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., introduced the Transparency and Honesty in Energy Regulations Act, a bill to prohibit the federal government from using the social cost of carbon, social cost of methane, social cost of nitrous oxide, or the social cost of any other greenhouse gas metrics in the rule-making process.