According to a new report in The New York Times, the Biden administration isn't going to let a Supreme Court loss slow down its bureaucratic machinery that's been focused on the so-called "transition" from cheap and reliable sources of energy to so-called "green" alternatives that are expensive, unreliable, and vastly untested on a scale as large as the United States.
The insiders and industry experts that spoke with The Times explained that "the Biden administration will have to enact 'layers and layers' of new policies rather than rely on a single sweeping program" and "the E.P.A. has been 'putting together a menu of three or four different approaches.'"
Apparently, and unsurprisingly, "the administration’s climate goals can be reached, but it will take more actions across the government, not just through the E.P.A." There's nothing big government loves more than additional big government. And even though the Biden administration lost at SCOTUS, the administration is transparent that it's goal is still to end coal as we know it.
Buried within The Times' report is a section on the Biden EPA's not-so-secret plan to continue its mission:
The E.P.A. also is enacting tougher restrictions on coal plants to reduce pollutants like soot and nitrous oxides, and to force the cleanup of water contamination from coal plants. Michael S. Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, has said those and other rules will have a side-benefit of also reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He also has indicated rule changes such as these might make some coal plants too expensive to continue to operate, resulting in more of them being closed down.
“By presenting all of those rules at the same time to the industry, the industry gets a chance to take a look at this suite of rules all at once and say, ‘Is it worth doubling down in investments in this current facility? Or should we look at that cost and say now it’s time to pivot and invest in a clean energy future?’” Mr. Regan said at an oil and gas conference in March.
“If some of these facilities decide that it's not worth investing in, and you get an expedited retirement, that’s the best tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
"Expedited retirement" is evidently the sanitized government-speak of "closed down by a federal regulatory burden." And, as usual, Biden's war on reliable and cheap energy is a short-sighted plan that doesn't show concern for what will happen to everyday Americans.
The small blurb toward the end afforded to those opposing Biden's regulatory war by The Times notes that "an aggressive agenda that drives more coal plant retirements would hurt the reliability of the electric grid." As Townhall reported previously, America's grid is in dire straits as it is. More than half of the lower 48 are under warnings of outages and rolling blackouts caused by a lack of generation capacity worsened by Biden's supply chain and inflation crises. For a swath of the country stretching from Minnesota to Michigan in the north down to Louisiana along the Gulf Coast, the grid is facing forced outages under even normal summer peak conditions. For Americans living from the plains west to the Pacific Ocean, they face outages under extreme conditions such as heat waves, drought, and wild fires.
What Biden wants to do — forcing "expedited retirement" of coal power — would only make the looming power grid crisis worse. But presumably, based on what the Biden administration has said and continues to do, they care as much about Americans' access to reliable power as much as they care about gas prices and the availability of baby formula.