http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=at2V_PYZsH_E

Former Vice President Al Gore joined a dozen Senate Democrats in opposing a Republican effort to block the Environmental Protection Agency from placing limits on greenhouse-gas emissions.
The Republicans may soon try to “strip” the EPA of “its ability to regulate most carbon pollution, letting the worst polluters off the hook,” Gore, who won an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to publicize global warming, said yesterday in an e-mail to supporters.

A Senate confrontation over the Obama administration’s move to limit emissions from cars, trucks and industrial sources may come as early as next week. Democrats have agreed to give Republicans a vote on the issue when they debate legislation to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said in an e-mail.
The EPA’s authority stems from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling on the scope of the Clean Air Act. Legislation to limit that authority and set up a cap-and-trade market for carbon dioxide permits is stalled in the Senate. On Dec. 7, the EPA declared carbon dioxide a danger to public health, opening the way for the agency to issue its own rules.
Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat and chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a letter to lawmakers yesterday that she expects Republicans to try to reverse the EPA’s so-called endangerment finding.
Senators should uphold the EPA’s authority because “repealing an endangerment finding based upon years of work by America’s scientists and public health experts is not appropriate,” Boxer said in the letter, which was signed by the 11 other Democrats on her committee.
Murkowski Amendment
Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, will have a chance to offer an amendment dealing with the EPA’s proposed greenhouse gas regulations when the debt-ceiling legislation is debated Jan. 20, Manley said.
Murkowski plans to decide “in the next couple of days” whether to seek a vote on that amendment, her spokesman, Robert Dillon, said in an e-mail. The lawmaker, who failed last year in an effort to curb the EPA’s authority, is also considering a disapproval motion under the Congressional Review Act to block the proposed greenhouse-gas regulations.
Democrats used this tactic in 2005, when they were in the Senate minority, to force a disapproval vote on President George W. Bush’s proposed EPA regulations for mercury pollution from power plants. The disapproval motion failed 47-51.
Murkowski’s effort to block EPA regulation of greenhouse gases, which scientists have linked to global warming, “is not about the science of climate change,” Dillon said. “This is simply about the effect EPA regulation will have on the U.S. economy.”
Obama’s ‘Cudgel’
The Obama administration, which wants Congress to pass cap- and-trade legislation, is using proposed agency regulations “as a cudgel to try to beat the Senate into passing economically crippling climate legislation,” Dillon said.
The U.S. House passed cap-and-trade legislation in June. Senate Democrats don’t plan a vote on the carbon trading measure until March at the earliest. The EPA aims to issue its rules by March.