EPA isn’t backing down on plans to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Instead, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is on the offensive, defending her agency’s plans to regulate GHG emission from cars, trucks, factories and eventually, small businesses. Her message: Environmental rules spark innovation and create jobs.

She bluntly warned that current efforts in Congress to thwart EPA plans are short-sighted and worse, anti-job.

Jackson’s fighting efforts to stop her agency from regulating GHGs. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has rounded up 40 co-sponsors of a resolution seeking to block EPA. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) is trying to delay EPA action for a year or two. Similar actions are pending in the House.

But Jackson thinks these are wrongheaded ideas. “At no point in our history has any problem been solved by ‘waiting another year to act’ or burying our heads in the sand,” she said during a National Press Club address March 8, clearly channeling Tom Petty’s country-rock hit, “I Won’t Back Down.” She urged these politicians to work on a productive energy policy that prepares America for a carbon-regulated world.

She has plenty of history to back up her claim that environmental rules pay off. In the past 30 years, EPA rules have reduced major air pollutant emissions by 54%.

Yet at the same time, Jackson pointed out, America’s economy grew by 126%, even as “more cars went on the road, more power plants went on line and more buildings went up.” Environmental rules are a win/win proposition, she said, because they spark investment and innovation, and that creates jobs and a cleaner and healthier environment.

Rather than stick their heads in the sand and hope global warming goes away, politicians and business leaders, Jackson says, should recognize that, worldwide, consumers are demanding green products.

“Companies must respond to parents who refuse to buy bottles with BPA in them, or that leech dangerous chemicals into drinking water. Industry can try to resist and ignore EPA, but I know — and they know — that they resist the forces of the green marketplace at their own peril.”

However, all the heat EPA’s been taking over pending GHG rules has pushed the agency to moderate its plans. Jackson recently said EPA will initially target only the very largest facilities. EPA’s planning to set the regulatory GHG threshold to 75,000 or even 100,000 tons per year (tpy). These power plants and large industrial facilities would see rules in 2011: direct emission control mandates under the Clean Air Act, not an emission cap-and-trade program.

Facilities emitting 50,000 tpy would see regulation in 2013. It’s not clear just when EPA would regulate small facilities.