In a recent editorial, we noted that President Trump’s decision to get rid of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan would be a major money-saver for companies and a deregulatory boost for the economy. Now, new data actually put a dollar figure on it.
Senior Trump officials now estimate that the president’s decision will save consumers some $33 billion. No, they won’t get a big notice on their monthly bill saying: “You saved $X amount this month, thanks to the repeal of the Clean Power Act.” But the money will go into their pocket nonetheless since they will avoid paying the much higher costs that Obama had baked into the energy cake through his plan to cut CO2 emissions by 35% over the next 14 years.
As we’ve said, this marks a major promise kept by President Trump. He showed himself on the stump to be one of the most energy-savvy presidents ever, and smartly campaigned heavily in coal and mining country, in places like Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while Hillary Clinton avoided them and even ridiculed them.
Trump promised not to abandon coal, which Obama Democrats almost gleefully were sending to energy extinction with Obama’s new law.
“We are committed to righting the wrongs of the Obama administration by cleaning the regulatory slate,” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said. “Any replacement rule will be done carefully, properly, and with humility, by listening to all those affected by the rule.”
It was never popular to begin with but was shoved down America’s throat by an overweening EPA under Obama.
Despite the Obama White House and its leftist shills in the media touting the Clean Power Plan’s benefits, the Daily Signal reports that the plan ran into a legal buzz saw of “multiple lawsuits from more than 150 entities, including 27 states, 24 trade associations, 37 rural electric cooperatives, and three labor unions, according to the EPA. On top of that, 34 senators and 171 House members filed an amicus briefing arguing the Clean Power Plan was illegal.”
It’s no surprise that in February of 2016, the Supreme Court put a halt to the program’s implementation while the many suits and legal challenges made their way through the court system.
In getting rid of this odious regulatory law, the U.S. dodged a big bullet. A study conducted by the American Action Forum, a conservative-leaning think tank, estimated in 2015 that at least 125,000 jobs would be lost and 66 coal-fired plants would be shut down by 2030 under Obama’s plan. Moreover, nearly half the nation’s coal energy would be lost due to the imposition of just one rule, and whole communities would have been impoverished.
Predictably, extremist green groups, who thought they had found their champion in Obama, have been outraged. Greenpeace Climate Director James Kelly sounded almost cartoonish, calling the cautious Pruitt a “dangerously corrupt fossil-fuel errand boy.” No word yet of any offer from Greenpeace to support the families that lose jobs and houses as a result of the group’s environmental extremism.
When it came to the Clean Power Plan, the left didn’t really care about CO2 or global warming. They wanted power. In that sense, the Clean Power Plan’s very name should have been a big hint. It represented a major shift of power from the states, which have traditionally regulated their own utilities, and handed it to green bureaucrats burrowed deeply in the federal government.
It would have given federal bureaucrats insane control over our nation’s economy. Instead, as the new estimate suggests, Americans quietly will get a $33 billion reduction in their future utility bills, thanks to Trump and Pruitt.
Read more at IBD
