Sen. Voinovich Circulating Amendment to Climate Change Bill

A Senate Republican aide said Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, was circulating for discussion language for an amendment to the climate change bill that would pre-empt EPA and state regulation of GHG emissions outside the bill, Greenwire reported. Regulation would be authorized only in cases where the emissions directly impacted public health or where they harmed the ozone layer. The amendment would limit the use of current environmental laws to develop emissions rules and also bar climate change nuisance lawsuits. It would assign the Transportation Department exclusive authority over vehicular emissions.

The source called pre-emption a "threshold issue" for Voinovich and said the Clean Air Act and other laws "were not written with an eye toward addressing climate change." Robert Dillon, the spokesman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said Voinovich's amendment would "make a climate bill more likely to gain Republican support. Obviously pre-emption is a must-have going forward. If we're going to address carbon emission regulation, it should be a national standard, and we shouldn't have redundant practices and policies that are going to reduce certainty for industry."