From my op-ed in IBD last week:
For months, legal and energy experts have said the Clean Power Plan is an overreach of regulatory authority, a threat to grid reliability and exorbitantly expensive. The U.S. Supreme Court just stopped the plan cold. The court has issued a stay in the implementation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce carbon emissions from the nation’s power plants 32% by 2030.
Twenty-seven states brought the legal challenge forward. They correctly argued that EPA has no authority under the Clean Air Act to issue such a sweeping mandate to reshape the nation’s electric sector.
The court’s ruling, and perhaps the eventual rejection of the plan, is an important victory for consumers and the right of states to manage their own energy systems. However, this victory aside, the Clean Power Plan is just one piece of the Obama administration’s larger anti-fossil fuel campaign that will raise energy costs.
Call it a “keep it in the ground” policy. This extreme stance was the brainchild of the environmental fringe and existed only on the periphery of political discussion just a few years ago. Now it’s the very foundation of the Obama administration’s regulatory and energy policies.
The Department of the Interior’s Stream Protection Rule and the newly announced moratorium on all new coal leases on federal lands are cases in point. The Stream Protection Rule is the penultimate example of a solution in search of a problem. Though streams are already well-protected, the new rule makes changes and additions to 475 existing regulations, taking regulatory authority away from the states and consolidating it inside the Department of the Interior. The goal is clear: cut states out and make it more costly to mine American coal.
The job losses from such an unnecessary rule could be horrific. More than 30,000 coal miners have already lost their jobs since 2011 (see chart above). Should the Stream Protection Rule become law, another 40,000 mining jobs will vanish. The total could be 280,000 jobs lost when indirect employment is included.
It’s not just jobs that are threatened by the rule. Some two-thirds of the nation’s proven coal reserves – a major source of affordable electricity – would become economically untenable. The cost of complying with the rule would be so great these reserves might as well not exist.
from – Latest Content http://ift.tt/1Txex2l
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