Ignoring the future of the planet, the health of the people, and the job growth potential of renewable energy, Environmental Protection Agency-hating EPA chief Scott Pruitt will sign a draft rule Tuesday repealing the Clean Power Plan (CPP) that was designed by the Obama administration to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s power plants. Pruitt, a climate-science denier, has been—as attorney general of Oklahoma—a leading foe of the CPP even before it was finalized.
Replacing the CPP would be what David Doniger at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) quite rightly labels the “Dirty Power Plan.” A plan that will maim and kill people, undermine economic potential, and continue a longstanding assault on the environment.
CO2 emissions are a major driver of the worldwide warming that is altering the climate. Cutting those emissions is essential for the U.S. to fulfill its pledge to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Accord. But then, Pr*$#%!^t Trump took the first step in withdrawing the United States from that agreement months ago, so failing to make good on that pledge is a feature, not a bug of his policies.
Combining the Paris withdrawal with a bogus Department of Energy plan to subsidize coal operations supposedly to maintain electrical grid reliability, the retrograde repeal of the CPP demonstrates clearly for anyone not yet convinced just how deeply the Trump regime is willing to kowtow to the fossil-fuel industry.
In Pruitt’s announcement delivered Monday in eastern Kentucky—once one of the nation’s leading extractors of coal and now a region with 20 of the nation’s 100 most impoverished counties—he declared, “The war on coal is over.” That’s a soundbite designed to persuade Americans, particularly the ever-dwindling number of coal miners, that the CPP repeal is all about jobs. Rhea Suh, president of the NRDC writes:
It’s not. We’ve made real progress cutting fossil fuel pollution over the past seven years, all while the economy’s added nearly 15 million jobs. The shift to cleaner, smarter ways to power our future has been a leading driver of that growth, employing more than three million Americans—nearly triple the workers who produce oil, coal, and gas—in a booming sector set to draw more than $7 trillion in investment worldwide over the next 25 years.
In June, a report from Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2)—“Opportunity Lost: How Rolling Back the Clean Power Plan Harms America’s Economy”—concluded that killing the CPP would also kill the opportunity to add more than half a million new jobs and $52 billion in gross domestic product to the economy by 2030. Also lost would be the 7 percent cut in electric bills provided by the energy efficiency gains accompanying the CPP’s emissions reductions. In an E2 press release:
“Scrapping the Clean Power Plan will hamper job creation and stifle economic growth, plain and simple,” said E2 executive director Bob Keefe. “For someone who calls himself a job creator, President Trump is rolling right over the 3 million workers in the rapidly growing solar, wind and energy efficiency industries. Adding insult to injury, a rollback would take money out of the pockets of families who could save on their electric bills. Going backward on this important program is a huge opportunity lost.”
As Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer at The New York Times reported Monday, the repeal is going to generate lawsuits from several states and from environmental advocates. And if those fail and Pruitt’s Dirty Power Plan is rolled out, there will be more lawsuits:
”Fuel-burning power plants are one of our nation’s largest sources of climate change pollution, and common-sense science — and the law — dictate that E.P.A. take action to cut these emissions,” Eric T. Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, said in a statement. “I will use every available legal tool to fight their dangerous agenda.”
Those lawsuits will be based at least in part on three Supreme Court decisions since 2007 that have ruled the EPA is not merely permitted to regulate CO2 emissions but is obligated to do so if the agency views them as dangerous pollutants. Which it does.
While fossil-fuel operators wish the Clean Power Plan had never been rolled out, they are eager to have something substituted for it in place by 2020 before a new, possibly Democratic president wins the White House and pushes a rule mandating more stringent CO2 emissions reductions than CPP now does. But even if a Dirty Power Plan is put into place, a Democratic administration can do exactly what Trump is doing—reverse it and install a new plan.
The NRDC’s Doniger writes that Pruitt’s repeal moves are based on “shirking” the agency’s court-ruled obligations and on “cooking the books on science and economics” by trickery in his analyses of benefits vs. costs of taking action under the CPP.
That view was reinforced in a New York Times op-ed written by Richard L. Revesz, a professor and dean emeritus at the New York University School of Law, and Jack Llenke, regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity:
In a leaked series of new analyses, the agency claims that jettisoning the Clean Power Plan, which limits planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s power plants, will save electric power producers up to $33 billion annually by 2030. But just two years ago, the agency estimated that the plan’s emissions goals could be achieved at less than a fifth of that price. [...]
The reality is that since the E.P.A. conducted the analysis that accompanied the 2015 plan, the costs of zero-carbon wind and solar energy have fallen substantially, as have price forecasts for lower-carbon natural gas. Accordingly, any new E.P.A. analysis of the Clean Power Plan’s costs should have found — as at least three outside assessments, including one by the American Petroleum Institute, have — that the rule’s pollution targets can be achieved even more cheaply than the agency initially thought.
But the Trump administration had no interest in conducting a good-faith update of the E.P.A.’s original estimates. Instead, it relied on accounting gimmicks to greatly inflate the Clean Power Plan’s projected costs and slash its expected benefits. The rule’s transformation from boon to boondoggle, as laid out in a draft of Mr. Pruitt’s plan to repeal it, is thus pure illusion.
No matter what Pruitt comes up with in his Dirty Power Plan, many states—both blue and red, even his home state of Oklahoma—are taking steps to curb carbon dioxide emissions and add renewable sources to their energy portfolios. While some are openly doing so because they accept that climate scientists are right, others are taking this path out of the growing knowledge that tough controls on emissions can’t be avoided forever and because the energy market is pricing coal, nuclear—and soon enough—natural gas out of the market.
Trump and Pruitt may succeed in turning back the clock in the short run. But they’re dinosaurs. And like those not-too-bright creatures, their day is done, even if they don’t realize it yet.