Trump's Clean Energy Plan Reinvigorates Federalism
President Donald J. Trump’s announcing his plan to gut and replace the so-called Clean Power Plan (CPP) will be greeted with cheers across America as states reassume control over their own emissions standards. The president and Acting Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler deserve thanks, as well as the dozens of state attorneys general who leveled the first legal challenges to the validity of President Obama’s sweeping measures in federal court. If it were not for our bipartisan efforts, the voices of average citizens would never have been heard. State attorneys general stood tall and won a historic stay at the Supreme Court of the United States to halt the CPP.
But the fight didn’t stop there. Earlier this year, 25 states encouraged the EPA to continue efforts toward rescinding this plan. The Obama administration’s CPP was drafted in the shadow of the Paris Agreement, and designed more to win the praise of Europe’s elite rather than to protect our environment, states’ rights, and the American economy. In a state like Arkansas where over half of the electricity is responsibly generated from coal-fired power plants, the impact would have affected the pocketbooks of Arkansas families. These increased costs would have had a direct impact on the state’s ability to grow good-paying jobs with fair, reasonable electric rates.
As a seventh-generation Arkansan raised on a cattle farm and married to a row-crop farmer, I can assure Americans that no one cares about clean air and water more than I do. But I do not care for heavy-handed and unlawful regulations from Washington that will hurt Arkansans and all Americans.
We should brace ourselves for the deluge of negative press surrounding the president’s announcement. Those on the outer edges of the left will scream that the reversal of Obama’s climate policy will result in a doomsday environmental scenario. The sky is not falling — figuratively or literally — so let me give you some honest talk.
Before President Obama’s gross executive overreach with the CPP, the EPA’s authority in this space had been detailed under the 1970 Clean Air Act. The effects of this landmark legislation — a 73 percent reduction in six key pollutants — have been remarkable, but they were still somehow deemed insufficient by the previous administration.
The proposed CPP would have granted the EPA authority to issue top-down regulatory mandates, instituting a one-size-fits-all policy that would have cost billions of dollars per year according to the Energy Information Administration’s analysis of the plan. Moreover, it would have caused double-digit electricity price spikes in the majority of states. Perversely, these costs would have disproportionately impacted minorities and senior citizens, many of whom live in low- or middle-income households. Not only did a congressional bipartisan majority oppose the CPP, but the Supreme Court stepped in, staying the rule while it worked its way through the lower courts.
Under President Trump’s new proposal, the EPA will refrain from setting an ironclad presumptive standard of performance; instead, hand-in-glove with the states, it will establish emissions guidelines for state plans that tackle greenhouse-gas emission from operating coal plants. Specifically, the states will have three years to determine, using the EPA’s “best system of emission reduction” norms, where efficiencies can be found. Instead of arbitrarily picking winners and losers, the president’s replacement rule will safeguard jobs and provide breathing room for states to create innovative energy portfolios — all without spurring the artificial acceleration of alternative energy sources and overburdening our budgets.
The legions of detractors, both domestically and internationally, are crying foul, but does the science support their cause? No. In calculating the regulatory impact analysis of the new rule, the EPA found that replacing the CPP with the current plan could reduce 2030 CO2 emissions by 0.7 percent; reduce co-pollutant emissions (SO2 and NOX) by 1 percent and 2 percent, respectively, and mercury by between 0.5 percent and 1 percent. Although it will take some time and hard work when the new plan is fully implemented, we are looking at CO2 reductions nearly 35 percent below 2005 levels. And best yet, these figures generally track with the projections under the CPP but are achieved more methodically, intelligently, and legally.
America has been and will remain the global leader in balancing energy production with environmental concerns. We command this envied position for a few reasons, among them our strong economy and a dynamic marketplace. When the federal government decides to meddle with the energy sector, not only are we damaged economically, but the military and civil security afforded by a robust energy structure is damaged. Here, our environmentalist friends would do well to remember that, without sufficient wealth and security, we cannot help Mother Nature as we would sometimes like.
Thankfully, the Trump administration understands and appreciates these concerns, and they know that a reinvigorated approach to federalism is the first step toward finding a solution. Here, again, the state attorneys general deserve a great deal of credit for getting energized and organized to remind Washington that, absent state input and control, federal energy policy will bankrupt Americans and harm the environment. The Trump administration listened. Now comes the hard part.
Leslie Rutledge is the Attorney General of Arkansas and the Chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association.
