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Cut Emissions? Congress Itself Keeps Burning a Dirtier Fuel

August 8, 2013 by

But just two miles from the White House stands the Capitol Power Plant, the largest single source of carbon emissions in the nation’s capital and a concrete example of the government’s inability to green its own turf.

The plant, which provides heating and cooling to the sprawling Capitol campus — 23 buildings that include the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court and Congressional office buildings, in addition to the Capitol building itself — is operated by Congress, and its transition to cleaner energy sources has been mired in national politics for years. But the failure of Congress to modernize its own facility also raises questions about the Obama administration’s ability to limit emissions from existing power plants when it has not been able to do so at a government-run facility so close to home.

The office of the architect of the Capitol, which oversees the operations of the plant, first moved to end the use of coal there in 2000 but was turned back by resistance from powerful coal-state senators who wanted to keep it as the primary fuel. The effort was revived in 2007 as a central part of the Green the Capitol Initiative, led by Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker at the time. The effort was defunded in 2011 after the Republicans took control of the House.

By then the plant had reduced the amount of coal in its fuel mix to 5 percent, down from 56 percent in 2007. But it made up the difference primarily with diesel fuel oil because, as the architect of the Capitol, Stephen T. Ayers, told a Congressional panel in 2008, converting the plant to burn natural gas exclusively would have required a modernization costing $6 million to $7 million.

At the time, the plant was spending about $2.7 million a year on fuel oil, about twice as much as it might have cost to produce the same amount of energy using natural gas. The plant remained below its capacity to burn natural gas, according to a 2010 report from the Government Accountability Office, and it continues to burn diesel fuel oil, which, in addition to being much more expensive, is a significant source of emissions.

Some critics say officials at the power plant are purposely choosing to burn dirtier fuel, as a political statement.

“We worked to figure out a way to get around the issue of coal,” said Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi. “But it is a futile effort until you get rid of the Republican majority. They do not believe in the word ‘green.’ ”

A review of public records and interviews with city and federal officials suggest that the root of the problem is a lack of enforcement by regulators and insufficient oversight from Congress.

Although the power plant is required to submit emissions reports to the District of Columbia’s Department of the Environment, which coordinates enforcement with the Environmental Protection Agency, and to apply for operation permits for new devices, records show that both agencies have failed to ensure that the power plant is in compliance.

E.P.A. officials with jurisdiction over the plant said that the agency did not have the capacity to inspect all facilities that got operating permits under the Clean Air Act, and that it relied heavily on partners like state and local energy agencies to make sure facilities were in compliance with their permits.

But district records show that the city has regularly failed to ensure that the plant is operating legally. In 2011, members of the city agency’s Air Quality Division discovered that one of the plant’s main boilers had exceeded the 10 ton-per-year limit for nitrogen oxides, which can cause severe breathing difficulties, by more than 20 tons per year since 2000.

“Emissions limits are meaningless if there is not adequate testing to ensure that they are being met,” Mike Ewall, the founder and director of the Energy Justice Network, a grass-roots organization advocating clean energy, wrote in a Feb. 13 letter to the city agency.

Donna Henry, a spokeswoman for the city environment agency, said the city had had difficulties finding records to clarify the plant’s emission history.

The chairmen and the ranking members of the House and Senate committees that oversee the power plant declined to comment, as did the office of the architect of the Capitol, often referred to as A.O.C.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/09/us/politics/just-across-town-a-test-of-obamas-emissions-goals.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Tentative Deal Is Reached to Raise Taxes on the Wealthy

January 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment

While the Senate moved toward a vote on legislation to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, the House was not going to consider any deal until Tuesday afternoon at the earliest, meaning that a combination of tax increases and spending cuts would go into effect as 2013 began. If Congress acts quickly and sends the legislation to President Obama, the economic impact could still be very limited.

Under the agreement, tax rates would jump to 39.6 percent from 35 percent for individual incomes over $400,000 and couples over $450,000, while tax deductions and credits would start phasing out on incomes as low as $250,000, a clear win for President Obama, who campaigned on higher taxes for the wealthy.

“Just last month Republicans in Congress said they would never agree to raise tax rates on the wealthiest Americans,” Mr. Obama said at a hastily arranged news briefing, with middle-income onlookers cheering behind him. “Obviously, the agreement that’s currently being discussed would raise those rates and raise them permanently.”

Democrats also secured a full year’s extension of unemployment insurance without strings attached and without offsetting spending cuts, a $30 billion cost.

As negotiators tied up the last points of dispute, officials said that the two top Democrats on Capitol Hill — Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California — had signed off on the agreement. In an effort to win over other Democrats uneasy with the proposal, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who had bargained directly with Republican leaders, traveled to the Capitol on Monday night for a 90-minute meeting with his former Senate colleagues.

“I feel very, very good,” Mr. Biden said after the meeting. “I think we’ll get a very good vote.”

In one final piece of the puzzle, negotiators agreed to put off $110 billion in across-the-board cuts to military and domestic programs for two months while broader deficit reduction talks continue. Those cuts begin to go into force on Wednesday, and that deadline, too, might be missed before Congress approves the legislation.

To secure votes, Mr. Reid also told Democrats the legislation would cancel a pending congressional pay raise — putting opponents in the politically difficult position of supporting a raise — and extend an expiring dairy policy that would have seen the price of milk double in some parts of the country.

Anticipating Senate approval of the deal, Speaker John A. Boehner late Monday said the House would “honor its commitment to consider the Senate agreement if it is passed. Decisions about whether the House will seek to accept or promptly amend the measure will not be made until House members — and the American people — have been able to review the legislation.”

The nature of the deal ensured that the running war between the White House and Congressional Republicans on spending and taxes would continue at least until the spring. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner formally notified Congress that the government reached its statutory borrowing limit on New Year’s Eve. Through some creative accounting tricks, the Treasury Department can put off action for perhaps two months, but Congress must act to keep the government from defaulting just when the “pause” on pending cuts is up. Then in late March, a law financing the government expires.

And the new deal does nothing to address the big issues that Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner hoped to deal with in their failed “grand bargain” talks two weeks ago: booming entitlement spending and a tax code so complex that few defend it anymore.

Jennifer Steinhauer and Robert Pear contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/us/politics/2-sides-in-talks-inch-closer-but-no-fiscal-deal-on-final-day.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Senate Leaders Set to Work on a Last-Minute Tax Agreement

December 29, 2012 by Leave a Comment

After weeks of fruitless negotiations between the president and Speaker John A. Boehner, Mr. Obama turned to Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader — two men who have been fighting for dominance of the Senate for years — to find a solution. The speaker, once seen as the linchpin for any agreement, essentially ceded final control to the Senate and said the House would act on whatever the Senate could produce.

“The hour for immediate action is here. It is now,” Mr. Obama said in the White House briefing room after an hourlong meeting with the two Senate leaders, Mr. Boehner and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader. He added, “The American people are not going to have any patience for a politically self-inflicted wound to our economy, not right now.”

Senate Democrats want Mr. McConnell to propose an alternative to Mr. Obama’s final offer and present it to them in time for a compromise bill to reach the Senate floor on Monday and be sent to the House. Absent a bipartisan deal, Mr. Reid said Friday night that he would accede to the president’s request to put to a vote on Monday Mr. Obama’s plan to extend tax cuts for all income below $250,000 a year and to renew expiring unemployment compensation for as many as two million people, essentially daring Republicans to block it and allow taxes to rise for most Americans.

Bipartisan agreement still hinged on the Senate leaders finding an income level above which taxes will rise on Jan. 1, most likely higher than Mr. Obama’s level of $250,000. Quiet negotiations between Senate and White House officials were already drifting up toward around $400,000 before Friday’s White House meeting. The two sides were also apart on where to set taxes on inherited estates.

But senators broke from a long huddle on the Senate floor with Mr. McConnell on Friday night to say they were more optimistic that a deal was within reach. Mr. McConnell, White House aides and Mr. Reid were to continue talks on Saturday, aiming for a breakthrough as soon as Sunday.

“We’re working with the White House, and hopefully we’ll come up with something we can recommend to our respective caucuses,” said Mr. McConnell, who has played a central role in cutting similar bipartisan deals in the past.

The emerging path to a possible resolution, at least on Friday, appeared to mirror the end of the protracted stalemate over the payroll tax last year. In that conflict, House Republicans refused to go along with a short-term extension of the cut, but Mr. McConnell reached an agreement that permitted such a measure to get through the Senate, and the House speaker essentially forced members to accept it from afar, after they had left forChristmas recess.

This time, the consequences are more significant, with more than a half-trillion dollars in tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts just days from going into force, an event most economists warn would send the economy back into recession if not quickly mitigated. With the House set to return to the Capitol on Sunday night, Mr. Boehner has said he would place any Senate bill before his chamber and let the vote proceed and the chips fall. The House could also change the legislation and return it to the Senate.

If the Senate is able to produce a bill that is largely bipartisan, there is a strong belief among House Republicans that the same measure would easily pass the House, with a large number of Republicans. While Mr. Boehner was unable to muster enough votes for his alternative bill that would have protected tax cuts for income under $1 million, that was because the measure lacked Democratic support, and was roughly a few dozen votes shy of passage with Republicans alone.

Helene Cooper and Ron Nixon contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/29/us/politics/key-meeting-looms-as-scaled-back-fiscal-deal-is-explored.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Jobs Report Becomes Latest Fodder in Fiscal Debate

December 8, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Mr. Boehner, meeting with reporters, declined to rule out a rise in the top income tax rate below the level President Obama wants, only to reiterate later that his opposition to tax rate increases remained unchanged. That suggested a possibility that although he opposes higher tax rates, they could still end up in a final package, given enough compromise by the White House on spending.

“There are a lot of things that are possible to put the revenue that the president seeks on the table,” Mr. Boehner said when asked about an increase in the top tax rate short of the 39.6 percent level of the Clinton era. “But none of it’s going to be possible if the president insists on his position, insists on ‘my way or the highway.’ ”

Mr. Boehner later released a statement saying: “As I’ve said many, many, many times: I oppose tax rate increases because tax rate increases cost American jobs. That has not changed, and will not change.”

Publicly neither side indicated progress toward a deal ahead of the end-of-the-month deadline for averting a series of automatic tax increases and spending cuts. But talks continued. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, met with Mr. Obama at the White House for private consultations.

Mr. Boehner put the onus on the president to make the next move. “This isn’t a progress report, because there’s no progress to report,” he told reporters outside his suite of offices in the Capitol. “The White House has wasted another week.”

The jobs report gave both sides a new talking point to press for compromise. The Labor Department on Friday said the economy added 146,000 jobs last month, and the unemployment rate fell to 7.7 percent from 7.9 percent in October. Those numbers were unexpectedly bright, given the impact of Hurricane Sandy and business fears about the potential fiscal crisis next month.

Mr. Boehner continued to say that his opposition to allowing the top two rates to rise from 33 percent and 35 percent to 36 percent and 39.6 percent stems from fears of the impact on small businesses that pay ordinary income tax rates, not the corporate tax rate. About 97 percent of small businesses do not turn enough profit to be affected, but Republicans note that more than half of small-business income — from the most profitable businesses, partnerships and limited liability corporations — would be hit by the increases.

“The risk the president wants us to take with increases of tax rates will hit many small businesses that create 50 to 70 percent of the jobs in our country,” Mr. Boehner said. “That’s the whole issue.”

Ms. Pelosi countered that after 33 straight months of gains in private-sector jobs, employment was now threatened by Republican refusal to pass Senate legislation extending Bush-era tax cuts for 98 percent of American households — but not the top 2 percent.

“The only obstacle standing in the way of middle-income tax relief are Republicans’ unwillingness to ask the top 2 percent to pay their fair share,” she said.

Senior House Republican aides say they will not move an inch more toward Mr. Obama unless he spells out immediate spending cuts for 2013. Even if Republicans agreed to the president’s request on higher tax rates for the rich, a deal would still be about $42 billion short of the $110 billion “down payment” Republican leaders need to pass legislation canceling next year’s across-the-board spending cuts.

“It would be an embarrassment to move further when the president is moving the opposite way,” a senior Republican leadership aide said.

Meanwhile, cracks emerged in the pressure campaign the White House is trying to assemble. A coalition of philanthropies refused publicly on Friday to join White House-organized efforts to raise the heat on Republicans in a show of moxie that portends poorly for any effort next year to tackle one of the largest tax benefits for the rich, the charitable deduction.

The coalition, the Alliance for Charitable Reform, said in a statement that it “refuses to go along with the White House’s request for charities to insert themselves into the debate over tax rates.”

“Our priority is to preserve and protect the charitable deduction,” it said. “Throughout his first term, President Obama has proposed reducing itemized deductions, including the charitable deduction, in multiple budgets and other spending proposals, and never voiced concern over the impact of his plan on the charitable sector.”

Alison Hawkins, a spokeswoman for the alliance, said White House officials had asked nonprofits to publicly oppose a Republican proposal to cap tax deductions at $25,000 instead of raising rates, and instead to press for higher upper-income tax rates to save government programs that partner with charities. Administration officials wanted charitable organizations to write letters to the editor and opinion articles and mount social media campaigns to amplify Mr. Obama’s message.

Such a public unmasking of a White House request is highly unusual, but charities have been at odds with the president on taxes ever since his first year in office, when he proposed capping tax deductions at 28 percent. Taxpayers in the 35-percent tax bracket are currently allowed to deduct 35 percent of charitable giving from their taxes, a policy the White House maintains is unfair to middle-class taxpayers in a lower bracket.

The 28-percent bracket was part of the president’s deficit-reduction offer last month.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/us/politics/jobs-report-becomes-latest-fodder-in-fiscal-debate.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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At White House, Top Lawmakers Say They Expect Budget Deal

November 17, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The four leaders – two Republicans, John A. Boehner, the House speaker, and Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader; and two Democrats, Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, and Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader – politely took turns at a microphone outside the West Wing, addressing each other by first names and describing the 70-minute session as constructive.

“We feel very comfortable with each other, and this isn’t something we’re going to wait until the last day of December to get it done,” Mr. Reid said.

“This isn’t the first time that we’ve dealt with these issues,” he said. “We feel we understand what the problem is. And we felt very – I feel very good about what we were able to talk about in there. We have the cornerstones of being able to work something out. We’re both going to have to give up some of the things that we know are a problem.”

Mr. Boehner said he outlined a framework for overhauling the tax code and spending programs that is “consistent with the president’s call for a fair and balanced approach.”

“To show our seriousness,” he added, “we put revenue on the table as long as it’s accompanied by significant spending cuts.”

His Senate counterpart, Mr. McConnell, made plain that Republicans were talking about spending for the entitlement programs, chiefly Medicare and Medicaid, which are growing fast as the population ages and, along with military spending, are squeezing everything else in the federal budget. Republican senators, Mr. McConnell said, “fully understand that you can’t save the country until you have entitlement programs that fit the demographics of the changing America in the coming years.”

“We’re prepared to put revenues on the table,” he added, “provided we fix the real problem, even though most of my members, I think without exception, believe that we’re in the dilemma we’re in not because we tax too little but because we spend too much.”

Ms. Pelosi, whose House Democratic colleagues include many liberals who resist significant changes to entitlement spending, said: “We understand our responsibility here. We understand that it has to be about cuts, it has to be about revenue, it has to be about growth, it has to be about the future.” She added, “I feel confident that a solution may be in sight.”

With Mr. Obama in the Roosevelt Room, the leaders made up the same cast who bitterly fought in 2011, then eventually agreed to nearly $1 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years but deadlocked on the roughly $4 trillion “grand bargain” both sides say the country needs.

Mr. Obama demands that it include up to $1.6 trillion in tax increases for the wealthy, while Republicans favor less in revenue but big cost-saving changes to Medicare and Medicaid.

The talks began on a friendly note, as well: With reporters and cameras briefly allowed into the room, the president wished a happy birthday to Mr. Boehner, who turns 63 on Saturday.

The two sides met after a tense week of postelection, pre-bargaining positioning. Mr. Obama, after making an issue of it in his re-election campaign, claims a mandate to insist on extending the Bush-era tax cuts, which otherwise expire on Dec. 31 — but not for income of $250,000 and above for couples and $200,000 for individuals.

More broadly, the outcome of the budget talks will go a long way toward defining his leverage for a second term, both in terms of his influence and the resources available to him to press his agenda.

The president “will not sign, under any circumstances, an extension of tax cuts for the top 2 percent of American earners,” his spokesman, Jay Carney, told reporters on Thursday.

“We have to make sure that taxes don’t go up on the middle class, that the economy remains strong,” Mr. Obama said as the meeting began.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/us/politics/obama-meeting-top-lawmakers-in-tough-deficit-talks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Deadline Passes as Debt Ceiling Talks Languish

July 25, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The dueling plans emerged after Mr. Boehner walked away from negotiations with the White House on Friday, leading to a frustrating weekend of talks in heat-scorched Washington. The leaders of both parties variously negotiated together over the phone, talked separately, conferred with their caucuses and tried to plot an end to the debt crisis that would assure the capital markets around the world that America would meet its debt obligations.

As the Aug. 2 deadline for lifting the debt ceiling nears, warnings are growing that the nation’s economy may be damaged by the protracted stalemate. A downgrade of the nation’s credit rating, which could raise the cost of borrowing, seemed more likely, deal or no deal.

Mr. Reid, the Senate’s top Democrat, was trying on Sunday to cobble together a plan to raise the government’s debt limit by $2.4 trillion through the 2012 elections, with spending cuts of about $2.7 trillion that would not touch any of the entitlement programs that are dear to Democrats or raise taxes, which is anathema to Republicans.

President Obama could endorse such a plan, even though it would fall far short of the ambitious goal of deficit reduction and entitlement changes that he says are necessary to shore up the nation’s finances.

At the White House on Sunday evening, Mr. Obama spent about an hour meeting in the Oval Office to try to hash out details of the Democratic proposal with Mr. Reid and the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi. The two emerged from the meeting with nothing to say to the throngs of reporters who had been encamped there for the third consecutive weekend, awaiting an agreement on the debt ceiling.

But administration and Congressional officials said that during the meeting, Mr. Obama and the Democratic leaders had resolved to hold firm against any short-term agreement that did not raise the debt ceiling beyond next year’s presidential elections.

“You see how hard this is right now,” one administration official said Sunday night. “Can you imagine going through this again in six months?”

That means, officials say, that Mr. Reid’s proposal may gather steam as the only viable alternative that is palatable to the administration.

The contours of Mr. Boehner’s backup plan were not entirely clear, but it seemed likely to take the form of a two-step process, with about $1 trillion in cuts, an amount the Republicans said was sufficient to clear the way for a debt limit increase through year’s end. That would be followed by future cuts guided by a new legislative commission that would consider a broader range of trims, program overhauls and revenue increases.

“The preferable path would be a bipartisan plan that involves all the leaders, but it is too early to decide whether that’s possible,” Mr. Boehner said in a “Fox News Sunday” interview. “If that’s not possible, I and my Republican colleagues in the House are prepared to move on our own.”

In a conference call with Republican lawmakers that lasted over an hour on Sunday night, Mr. Boehner said he was seeking “a vehicle that can pass in both houses,” according to someone on the call, who added that Mr. Boehner had made an emotional appeal to his fellow Republicans to stick together. “If we’re divided,” he said, “our leverage gets minimized.”

One freshman lawmaker on the call described Mr. Boehner as sounding weary and said many Republicans were focused on some version of a balanced budget amendment, which was already passed by the House as part of broader legislation but then rejected by the Senate.

For the White House, the Reid proposal represents a Hail Mary pass that is meant to, at the very least, avoid putting the country through a repeat of the debt ceiling negotiations next year, an election year.

Jackie Calmes contributed reporting.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=7f007ac112b17d59cd800dcc7f74ae7b

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