The Environmental Protection Agency says it will repeal President Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Just plain get rid of it. To which we say, heck, what took you so long?
The Clean Power Plan (CPP) sounds wonderfully green-y, but it is, in fact, a massive power grab by the federal government for the spurious purpose of reducing greenhouse emissions that supposedly cause global warming.
Never mind the fact that the science underlying the claims is highly questionable. What the EPA under Obama planned to do was blatantly illegal, contrary to the spirit and the letter of the Constitution.
The Obama plan was ambitious and dictatorial, using a top-down command approach to reduce CO2 output from its 2005 level by 32% by 2030. By employing complex formulas, the EPA came up with precise targets for carbon-dioxide reductions for the states. It would have required utilities to make a massively expensive switch from carbon-based fuels to so-called “alternatives” such as wind and solar power, at a cost of billions.
Fortunately, thanks to legal challenges, this costly nightmare was never put into place. And now it won’t be, at least not under this administration.
As others have pointed out, the biggest problem is that the Obama plan violated the Constitution’s Separation of Powers by giving the EPA near-dictatorial ability to make laws and impose them on the 50 states and their utilities.
But besides its illegality, CPP was a regulatory and economic nightmare. NERA, an economic consulting firm, estimated the plan would cost between $41 billion and $73 billion — a year. Much of that money would be spent by you, the consumer, in the form of much higher utility rates.
And what would we get for the money? A measly reduction of 0.02 degrees less in temperature rise. So apart from being illegal and unnecessary, it would do virtually nothing to halt or slow global warming, even by the Obama administration’s own estimates.
This shows not only Trump’s deep business understanding of how important energy is to the economy but also that much of the action taken by the previous administration amounted to climate fraud — a cheap bid to grab still more power for the federal government without any real benefit for average Americans.
Trump showed he was serious about environmental regulatory reform by naming former energy-state Gov. Rick Perry of Texas as his energy secretary, putting former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who once sued the EPA, to head the EPA; by hiring Andrew R. Wheeler, a former energy industry lobbyist, to work as Pruitt’s No. 2; and by no longer bringing in far-left green groups to collude with EPA bureaucrats in destroying our energy grid in the name of “climate change mitigation.”
As part of his blitz to deregulate the economy, Trump’s now on his way to getting rid of one of the worst regulations ever. This will be his biggest win yet.
Read more at IBD
The title of the article totally contradicts the content. The title should rather be something like “A VICTORY for Climate Sanity: . . . “
A win for some Common Sense we are finaly getting back to sanity and a end to idiotic regulations brough by a Dumb-O-Crat