Reason #5742 - #5743 That Trump Was Elected

The End Of The War On Coal?

Back when Barack Obama was first rolling out his new Clean Power Plan in 2012 there were immediate questions about it. While it was still in the development phase, it was recognized by most conservatives for what it truly was: a backdoor energy tax. The details were onerous enough to raise concerns that many plants would simply need to shut down rather than managing to keep going until they could afford to transition to natural gas.

Those concerns are off the table as of these week… at least for the immediate future. The EPA is announcing that the Clean Power Plan is being withdrawn after concluding that it was an expensive overreach by the federal government delivering little in the way of returns on investment. Fox News has the details.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced Monday that the Trump administration is moving to scrap the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s signature regulatory program to curb emissions from coal-fired power plants.
Pruitt made the announcement at an event in Hazard, Ky. He said that on Tuesday, he will sign a proposed rule to formally withdraw from the plan.
The decision comes after President Trump in late March ordered a review of the controversial program, which was put on hold more than a year ago by the Supreme Court amid legal challenges from, among others, Pruitt himself.

 Trump's $33 Billion Tax Cut You Didn't Know You Just Got

In getting rid of this odious regulatory law, the U.S. dodged a big bullet. A study conducted by the American Action Forum, a conservative-leaning think tank, estimated in 2015 that at least 125,000 jobs would be lost and 66 coal-fired plants would be shut down by 2030 under Obama's plan. Moreover, nearly half the nation's coal energy would be lost due to the imposition of just one rule, and whole communities would have been impoverished.

Predictably, extremist green groups, who thought they had found their champion in Obama, have been outraged. Greenpeace Climate Director James Kelly sounded almost cartoonish, calling the cautious Pruitt a "dangerously corrupt fossil-fuel errand boy." No word yet of any offer from Greenpeace to support the families that lose jobs and houses as a result of the group's environmental extremism.

When it came to the Clean Power Plan, the left didn't really care about CO2 or global warming. They wanted power. In that sense, the Clean Power Plan's very name should have been a big hint. It represented a major shift of power from the states, which have traditionally regulated their own utilities, and handed it to green bureaucrats burrowed deeply in the federal government.

It would have given federal bureaucrats insane control over our nation's economy. Instead, as the new estimate suggests, Americans quietly will get a $33 billion reduction in their future utility bills, thanks to Trump and Pruitt.

Until Washington D.C. goes on wind and solar, I prefer nuclear, but as Puerto Rico just found out, it's better to have electricity than not.