The US Environmental Protection Agency confirmed two related and already well-founded suspicions when it published its final rule on emissions of carbon dioxide from power plants. One suspicion is that the administration of Barack Obama follows instructions of environmental extremists. The other is that EPA's regulatory blitz targets natural gas along with coal.
Under the Clean Power Plan (CPP), states must cut CO2 emissions by an average 25% from 2005 levels and by 32% by 2030. Compared with last year's proposal, the final rule requires slightly deeper cuts but provides slightly more time for compliance. It also retreats from the earlier draft's treatment of methane as a long-term bridge to carbon-free power generation. Newly emphasized are efficiency improvement and renewable energy, which is to account for 28% of generation capacity by 2030. While gas still will prosper as primary energy for electricity, it faces explicit antagonism.
Obliging extremism
The Natural Resources Defense Council, which dislikes all fossil energy, created the CPP framework. The delegation of compliance decisions to states and other key elements of the approach adopted by EPA come from a March 2013 NRDC report: "Closing the Power Plan Carbon Pollution Loophole: Smart Ways the Clean Air Act Can Clean Up America's Biggest Climate Polluters." When NRDC speaks, EPA listens.
The group spoke clearly after EPA published the CPP proposal last year.
"These standards are not a green light for increasing gas use in the power sector," wrote Frances Beinecke, then NRDC president, in a June 6, 2014, blog post. "To the contrary, the standards can and should help reduce our country's dependence on all fossil fuels." She said her group would work to strengthen EPA's "conservative" assumptions about emission cuts possible through energy efficiency and renewable energy. "A greater reliance on efficiency and renewables will further reduce projected reliance on both coal and gas," Beinecke wrote. EPA's final rule obliges.
The CPP isn't only a triumph of extremism. It's also an affront to constitutional governance. Anticipating challenges to federal usurpation of state affairs, the EPA set CPP compliance timelines that, even relaxed, force the makeover of power systems to be finished before lawsuits can be adjudicated. A similar squeeze worked with an earlier slash at coal by EPA, the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard.
This Executive Branch imperiousness is appalling. The CPP represents an economic gamble undertaken in service to a climatological theory asserted with indefensible certitude by zealots who represent a small but well-organized fraction of the population. Obama is governing for them, for bragging rights at a December climate summit in Paris, and for his legacy as an instigator of change rather than for the majority of Americans who won't like what change does to energy costs.
Whom does the president think he fools when he claims, as he did in a ludicrously moralistic speech on Aug. 3, that replacing cheap fuel with costlier substitutes will lower electricity bills by $85/year? What does climate change have to do with asthma, 90,000 childhood cases/year of which, he insisted in the same speech, will vanish as uneconomic energy gets forced into the market? And where are the "premature deaths from power plant emissions" that Obama promises to be reduced in number by 90% in 15 years? The president has resorted to alarmist distortion, that hallmark of climate politics, as in excuse to impose economic martial law.
The resistance
Obama and his EPA must be stopped. Legal challenges are promising, but they'll have to win early stays of CPP implementation. Congress is considering useful legislation that would rein in the runaway agency. Although Obama would veto any bill like that, lawmakers should pass one anyway. And they should resolve to thwart whatever mischief he brings home from Paris.
Gas producers not already engaged should support the resistance. They, as the final CPP makes clear, are targets in a misguided effort to make Americans render major sacrifice for, at best, minor environmental gain.
