The EPA proposal to impose a de facto ban on new coal-fired
power plants received more than two million comments from the public - but it
looks like it was just one five-page comment from the Energy and Environment
Legal Institute (E&E Legal) that sent EPA scrambling back to the drawing
board.
The draft rule mandated the use of so-called carbon capture
and storage, a technology that would inject carbon dioxide underground but
which has so far proved to be little more than a white elephant experiment. To
mandate this technology, the law required the EPA to prove it was
"adequately demonstrated" and "commercially
available." Thanks to E&E Legal, they failed.
Dawn Reeves at Inside EPA broke the story that carbon
capture and storage has apparently been dropped from the agency's final rule
regulating greenhouse gas emissions. She also, curiously, reports that the
White House may not allow the EPA to back down, instead forcing the agency to
defend the legally indefensible in court.
But whether they win now or not until the issue is
litigated, E&E Legal has scored a huge victory for the rule of law and
economic common sense.
I reached out to Chris Horner, their lead author on the
comment that carried the day.
"We submitted comments for the record explaining that
EPA had made a mockery of the interagency review process, ignoring the
government's own experts in order to push an ideological agenda," Horner
said.
That's a crucial point because if the EPA is demonstrably
not serving as an expert but an ideological actor, it would not warrant
deference in court, making its whole global warming agenda vulnerable.
E&E Legal obtained information proving that expert
analysis from the Department of Energy actually concluded the opposite of what
the EPA claimed when they asserted that carbon capture and storage had been
"adequately demonstrated."
"The truth is that the experts had persuasively argued
the opposite, in effect, that carbon capture and storage has been demonstrated
to be not viable," Horner said. "Making this more egregious, the
Department of Energy had paid a quarter of a billion taxpayer dollars to learn
this information and lesson that EPA ignored and even misrepresented."
The EPA was caught red-handed faking science and ignoring
expert opinion, in effect requiring a technology that they knew did not
practically exist. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that their actual
intended purpose was indeed to impose a de facto ban on coal-fired power
plants. And they might have gotten away with it if E&E Legal hadn't busted
them.
The stakes are enormous because the rule on new power plants
is also the legal predicate for the EPA's proposed rule regulating existing
power plants. That rule establishes numerical emissions reduction targets for
the states and coerces states to meet those targets by adopting cap-and-trade
tax schemes and other policies that EPA cannot impose itself. All to achieve
President Obama's goal of fighting global warming by making electricity prices
"necessarily skyrocket."
If the EPA cannot, because of this now-exposed legal
vulnerability, rely on carbon capture and storage, then the new source
numerical targets will have to be revised up significantly, a major victory.
Unfortunately, the political activists who control the EPA
see this as only a necessarily tactical retreat, with retooled rules still
certain to impose steeply higher prices on consumers for emissions reductions
that will have no impact on global carbon dioxide levels or global average
temperatures.
That's why Horner hopes that the biggest impact of E&E
Legal's depantsing of the EPA on carbon capture and storage, through a
transparency campaign that continues regardless of EPA's rumored move, will be
to discredit the EPA enough that Congress will step in to put a stop to the
misuse of the 1970 Clean Air Act to do all of this. I couldn't agree more.
http://townhall.com/columnists/philkerpen/2015/05/23/epa-plan-to-ban-coal-hits-major-roadblock-n2002814/print
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