This is what the Chamber of Commerce is chanting lately. The National Association of Manufacturers is threatening to sue. Yet the Environmental Protection Agency has announced that if Congress won’t legislate to cut green-house gases, they will regulate.

The EPA’s announcement is the ace Obama’s administration has been holding in its pocket, an ace that may trump the US’s attempts to control carbon emissions. A Supreme Court decision earlier this year has empowered the EPA to assert that CO2 is a pollutant, and as such must be regulated from vehicles. Now, the administration has authorized the agency to start regulating GHG’s from power stations and industry, the backbone of the US economy.  "We are not going to continue with business as usual," said Lisa Jackson, EPA’s chief, to the New York Times. “We have the tools and the technology to move forward today, and we are using them."

The new rules would cover plants that emit at least 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. The regulation primarily focuses on 400 power plants, which will suffer fines if they fail to utilize the cleanest available technology. In addition to the power plants, another 14,000 or so facilities and smaller power plants will also face the threat of fines, and would need to renew construction and operating permits based on their ability to cut their emission of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other GHG.

The rules could take effect as soon as 2011, unless Congress legislates. "The Economist" argues that businesses would prefer the carrot of a cap-and-trade legislation to the stick of government regulators nosing around their plants and telling them what technologies to use.

Senators John Kerry and Barbara Boxer have stepped up and published their own version of the cap-and-trade bill previously know as Waxman-Markey. They upped the ante by proposing a 20% GHG reduction by 2020 over 2005, rather then the 17% previously proposed.

The stakes are high and the battle over them is turning fierce. The Chamber of Commerce is opposing cap-and-trade, stating that corporations do not need to pay for the right to emit carbon. According to the "WSJ," that was enough for giants such as PG&E, Exelon and Nike to resign their membership and weaken one of the best funded opponents of climate legislation.

Suddenly, “no regulation without legislation” is beginning to sound climate friendly.

David Manor