She did not address why the pace of rule making had slowed so sharply in 2012 and 2013, or why the energy efficiency rules were held up.
The administration has spent as long as two years reviewing some of the energy efficiency rules proposed by the Energy Department, bypassing a 1993 executive order that in most instances requires the White House to act on proposed regulations within 90 days.
White House officials have said energy efficiency rules issued in Mr. Obama's first term would yield $400 billion in consumer savings and reduce carbon emissions by hundreds of millions of tons through 2030.
Growth for centrifugal pumps is now tied to new regulations and energy efficiency rules that are being considered globally.
Ten states have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over stalled energy efficiency rules aimed at reducing pollution.
Most of the emissions cuts the United States has offered as part of the Paris pact are already under way, through a combination of state programs to restrain emissions, federal regulations requiring better gas mileage and other energy efficiency rules, he said.
"Obviously [the Competitive Enterprise Institute] would prefer repealing the so-called Clean Power Plan and not replacing it, but if a replacement is necessary, then a legal inside-the-fenceline rule would be acceptable," Ebell wrote to HuffPost in an email, referring to energy efficiency rules for individual plants.
To address that worry, the set-aside would ideally be no bigger than the reduced demand for permits resulting from the energy-efficiency rule, which is the ostensible reason for acting.That would be a modest measure: the carbon price actually fell in response to the committee's announcement.
And it is not the only tool at the president's disposal: different government agencies have the power to set fuel-efficiency standards for cars and energy-efficiency rules for appliances, for example.
But they point out that many of his signature accomplishments, like a ban on smoking in restaurants, mandatory sentences for those who carry illegal guns and energy-efficiency rules for building owners, were approved by the City Council.
The country has used its EU presidency this year to try to replace the EU's "energy efficiency first" principle with a rule that member states cannot promote energy efficiency projects over gas infrastructure projects.
