Despite taking a major loss at the Supreme Court of the United States last year in West Virginia v. EPA, President Biden and his administration are set to announce another regulatory policy affecting power plants later this week that will drive energy costs even higher and is probably illegal, too.
Politico called the forthcoming EPA policy "aggressive" for "ushering in the most stringent regulations on fossil fuel plants in the nation’s history." After reportedly making the rule even more restrictive over the past several months, it looks like the final version will "require power companies to capture most of their carbon emissions rather than letting it enter the atmosphere," according to Politico. Currently, however, "[n]o commercial power plants in the United States use carbon-capturing technology." So, as Politico noted, Biden is again throwing caution to the wind and "testing the limits of what the court will tolerate" by enacting another extreme policy.
So, Biden is going to try forcing the change — the Constitution and American consumers be damned — and conservatives are already hitting the White House for its latest attempt to force its radical supposedly "green" energy policies that run afoul of the law and make already high costs even more untenable for Americans.
Steve Milloy, who served on the Trump-Pence EPA transition team, said that, "like his proposal to essentially ban gas-powered cars by setting stringent emissions standards, Biden’s proposal to set stringent emissions standards so as to ban fossil fuel plants without carbon capture is illegal and has no chance of withstanding legal scrutiny in light of last year’s SCOTUS decision in West Virginia v. EPA." Milloy warned that "it may take years for SCOTUS to rule on this controversy and, in the meantime, much damage will be done to the fossil fuel plants that our electricity grid depend on."
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"Biden’s EPA proposed power plant rule ignores the fact that U.S. air quality is better than ever, and worldwide coal use is growing," noted Frank Lasee, the president of Truth in Energy and Climate. "Communist China uses more than half of the 8 billion tons of coal used annually," Lasee reminded, adding "China and 14 other nations are growing their coal usage."
That reality, Lasee explained, means "closing our coal and natural gas plants will not change the weather or the climate" and instead "will needlessly cause our electricity prices to go up even more. By forcing reliable electricity plants to close, it will lead to more blackouts caused by shortages and heavier reliance on taxpayer subsidized, unreliable, part-time wind and solar," he said.
Tom Harris, the executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition, pointed out that, "contrary to the assertions of activists, politicians and most mainstream media, we are close to the lowest levels of CO2 in Earth’s history." What's more, Harris noted that "the Climate Change Reconsidered series of reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change summarized thousands of studies from peer-reviewed scientific journals that either debunk or cast serious doubt on the hypothesis that emissions of CO2 from human activities will cause catastrophic climate change."
"The Biden administration's proposed rule will cause an additional spike in energy costs to American households," said Heartland Institute President James Taylor. "Apparently, $4-per-gallon gasoline is simply not enough to satisfy this president's blood lust for higher inflation and less available American energy."
So, exactly how bad will the EPA's new emissions policy be? We'll have to wait for the official announcement to find out. But if the Biden administration's repeated losses at the Supreme Court have shown Americans anything, it's that the president and his cabinet are unconcerned with legal guardrails. And, if Biden's energy policy so far as displayed anything, it's that Biden — or those handling him — will stop at nothing to force the so-called "transition" to more expensive and less reliable "green" energy.
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