Washington Watch: Pruitt Will Terminate Clean Power Plan
Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Scott Pruitt relied on flawed assumptions and pro-dirty energy bias to justify his decision to end the Clean Power Plan (CPP).
Pruitt announced last week that the EPA was issuing a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” to repeal the CPP, which sets state-by-state targets for reducing atmospheric carbon emissions. Publication of the notice in the Federal Register will trigger a 60-day public comment period. After the comment period, it is anticipated that the Trump EPA will announce the rule’s repeal, and litigation will be filed to block the repeal.
In announcing the repeal, Pruitt repeated his claim that the CPP exceeded his agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act – an assertion not backed up by court rulings to date. The notice of rulemaking was also accompanied by a “Regulatory Impact Analysis” which addresses costs and benefits of the repeal. Critics of the proposed repeal point out that this cost-benefit analysis relies on fundamentally flawed assumptions which overstate the costs of the CPP, understate its benefits, and ignore the loss in jobs and health from reversing course on clean energy.
National League of Conservation Voters (LCV) president Gene Karpinski said, “Scott Pruitt has already granted dozens of favors to his polluter friends, but repealing the EPA’s Clean Power Plan will be one of the worst. People across the country submitted a record-breaking 8 million comments in support of establishing the country’s first national limits on dangerous power plant carbon pollution, but Pruitt is proposing to gut this commonsense policy – threatening our health, worsening climate change and continuing the cycle of monstrous hurricanes and wildfires that are devastating countless communities.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) called the proposed repeal “another repeal and replace scam” that would replace the Clean Power Plan with a “Dirty Power Plan”. LCV, NRDC, other conservation advocacy groups, clean industry groups, and many states are expected to fight the repeal in court.
On a related Washington note, Trump Energy Secretary Rick Perry recently announced plans to subsidize utilities for maintaining use of coal and nuclear plants, on the fallacious claim that their increasing replacement with cleaner energy sources undercuts reliability of electricity supply. In reality, this plan means that taxpayers and electric ratepayers will be asked to increase their already huge financial subsidies for economically uncompetitive coal and nuclear plants. NRDC energy policy expert Kit Kennedy calls it “an outrageous bailout of the coal and nuclear industries on the backs of American consumers” which would “lead to higher energy bills…as well as dirtier air and increased health problems.”
