Texas fights EPA CPP

U.S. States Rebel against Obama’s ‘War on Coal’ Governor decries ‘unprecedented meddling with Texas’

(Newsmax) – State Officials have gone on the offensive against the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) limiting carbon-dioxide emissions at existing fossil-fuel-fired power plants. The CPP would establish state-by-state carbon emissions rate reduction targets.

Gov. Mary Fallin, R-Okla., in late April issued an executive order arguing that the EPA “has exceeded its authority under the Clean Air Act,” the 1970 federal law requiring the EPA to take steps to reduce air pollution that harms the public’s health, from which the EPA claims authority for the CPP.

Fallin also prohibits the state’s Department of Environmental Quality from participating with the development of plans to implement CPP regulations. And she said that if the CPP is adopted this summer, she “will not submit” a State Implementation Plan (SIP) intended to ensure full compliance with the federal mandate, Thomas K. Lindsay disclosed in an article for realclearpolicy.com.

Nine days after Fallin issued the executive order, Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz to discuss what Abbott predicted would be “grave consequences for the State of Texas” if the CPP is enforced.

Abbott’s press advisory said the CPP “will certainly result in higher energy prices for Texans, killing jobs and stagnating Texas’ unprecedented economic growth.” The Texas House of Representatives is considering a bill that would require the state, like Oklahoma, to deny the EPA’s request that it submit a SIP for the federal mandate.

Texas and Oklahoma are not alone, observes Lindsay, director of the Centers for Tenth Amendment Action and Higher Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He cited one survey disclosing that there are now 32 states “in which elected officials have expressed firm opposition” to the CPP.

Several U.S. senators have proposed legislation to combat the CPP. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., head of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee’s Clean Air and Nuclear Safety Subcommittee, and six other senators introduced the Affordable Reliable Energy Now Act (ARENA). The bill would extend the CPP’s compliance deadlines pending review by federal courts, and bar any state from being forced to implement a SIP or a Federal Implementation Plan if the state’s governor concludes that doing so would harm the state’s economy.

ARENA would also prohibit the EPA from withholding federal highway funds from states that are found to not be in compliance with the CPP.

FOOTNOTE: According to The Atlantic, the EPA itself admits that the CPP’s effect against the threat of climate change will be so small, reducing warming by 0.016 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century that it will be impossible to measure.

http://www.newsmax.com/insiderreport/states-rebel-against-epa/2015/05/24/id/646514/ - See more at: http://www.teaparty.org/u-s-states-rebel-obamas-war-coal-100338/#sthash.oIW8sr6z.dpuf

Source:http://www.teaparty.org/u-s-states-rebel-obamas-war-coal-100338/