EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has announced that his agency is beginning the formal process to repeal the Clean Power Plan. “The war on coal is over,” Pruitt said Monday during a visit to Hazard, Kentucky, to announce the policy change.
Well, not exactly. It won’t be as easy as it sounds for the agency to abandon the Obama Administration’s plan for putting coal out of business as a way of mitigating climate change.
According to the New York Times, “In order to repeal regulations, federal agencies have to follow the same rule-making system (requiring periods of public notice and comment) used to create regulations, which can take about a year.”
Of course there will be a showdown with the greens who promise court challenges. “But neither the EPA nor President Donald Trump can repeal the Clean Power Plan by fiat, however, much as they might like to pretend they can,” writes Paul Rauber in the Sierra Club magazine.
That’s rich, since the anti-carbon crowd expressed no such outrage when the Obama Administration bypassed Congress and used executive powers to force the draconian rules on the coal industry.
The EPA’s legal rationale for CPP was suspect from the start. The agency took an element of Section 111 of the Clean Air Act and twisted it to comport with its agenda of remaking the country’s energy portfolio. The stretch was so egregious that when challenged, the U.S. Supreme Court took the unusual step of blocking the rule until it could be adjudicated in a lower federal court.
The agency consistently played fast and loose with the supposed benefits. As the Wall Street Journal points out, “social costs were compared against global climate benefits,” and even those were minute. By the EPA’s own models, the CPP would have reduced global temperatures by less than 0.01 degrees Celsius by the year 2100.
Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy tried to sidestep the contention that the rule would make it impossible to build a coal-fired power plant in the future by arguing on behalf of viability of carbon capture technology. “We believe carbon sequestration is actually technically feasible,” she testified before Congress.
But technically feasible and commercially viable are distinctly different. Mississippi Power Company’s Kemper County power plant was supposed to be the shining example of how the Clean Power Plan could work with carbon sequestration, but that has turned into a boondoggle. The operators have abandoned coal and turned to natural gas.
Natural gas and alternative fuels that are increasingly market-viable are the biggest competitors to coal. For decades, coal provided cheap, reliable energy for a growing economy. It still plays a critical role and will for years to come, although the marketplace is much more rigorous and coal will never been what it once was.
But at least now that the Trump Administration is righting the wrong of the previous administration, coal’s chief competitor will no longer be the federal government.