Tipsheet

Las Vegas Review-Journal: Obama’s Clean Power Plan Is ‘Unlawful Overreach’

You know about Obama’s Clean Power Plan that will save all of humanity from the non-threat that is global warming. It aims to reduce carbon emissions by nearly 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2025. In the process, the regulatory costs will soar into the hundreds of billions of dollars, millions of jobs from black and Hispanic communities will be gutted, fixed-income seniors will have their budgets nuked by rising energy costs, and the plan pretty much punishes states that didn’t vote for Obama in 2012. A study from the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association showed that if electrical costs rise at least 10 percent, it would mean the loss of 1.2 million jobs by 2021, a large chunk of them–500,000–hitting rural Americans. It’s a bad plan, and Americans pretty much know that this plan will cause their energy bills to rise. While The Wall Street Journal has called this plan “regulation without representation,” I prefer the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s description: “unlawful overreach.”

Barack Obama will be in Las Vegas on Monday to deliver the keynote speech at Clean Energy Summit 8.0, where he'll no doubt receive unyielding applause for the most economically harmful, unlawful overreach of his presidency.

The president has ordered a complete restructuring of the American energy sector through regulatory fiat. His Clean Power Plan, the New Testament for the Church of Climate Change, gives the Environmental Protection Agency the kind of authority that not even the president is provided. The EPA will coerce states into adopting policies that would never pass Congress — the abandonment of coal-fired power, cap-and-trade schemes, more aggressive transitions to more costly green power — to meet the arbitrary goal of reducing the country's carbon emissions 32 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels. This will dramatically increase power costs, stifle economic growth, reduce standards of living and decrease the reliability of the power grid.

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Contrary to what Mr. Obama believes, climate change science isn't settled, and it never will be. That's why his believers so often resort to false alarmism, demanding Draconian action based on emotional appeals. "The time for debate has passed! We have to do something right now!" Never mind that U.S. carbon emissions already are falling thanks to cheap, abundant natural gas and technological advances.

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If he won't recognize the lawmaking authority of Congress, then the courts should slap him down — with states leading the challenge.

Some states are already considering ignoring the new EPA regulations. Legal battle over this seems imminent–and that's a good thing.