Senior Trump administration officials announced that a repeal of the Obama-era, “Clean Power Plan” would save an taxpayers $33 billion.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) formally began the process that includes the repealing of the Obama era rules on the limiting carbon emissions of the power plants on Tuesday, with Administrator Scott Pruitt announcing that, “The war on coal is over.”
The EPA entered a Notice of the Proposed Rulemaking in the Federal Register and would be open for the next 60 days for public comment.
The Officials from the White House commented that repealing the regulations, which set up prohibitive emission standards for the coal burning power plants, was delivering on President Trump’s promise to protect and revive the American coal industry.
The Obama administration built their radical climate agenda around the so-called “Clean Power Plan,” which was a suite of executive orders and aggressive agency regulations aimed at dismantling the domestic coal industry entirely – an industry which was primarily based out of rural and Republican parts of the country. Since the introduction of the “Clean Power Plan”, coal production had plummeted by a shocking 29% and cost over 250,000 blue collar jobs.
Pruitt in a statement said, “The Obama administration pushed the bounds of their authority so far with the CPP that the Supreme Court issued a historic stay of the rule, preventing its devastating effects to be imposed on the American people while the rule is being challenged in court. We are committed to righting the wrongs of the Obama administration by cleaning the regulatory slate. Any replacement rule will be done carefully, properly, and with humility, by listening to all those affected by the rule.”
The White House said repealing the Clean Power Plan was returning the EPA to its original scope of authority under the Clean Air Act. Officials cited the section 111 (d) of the law, which trusted states to set their own pollutant standards that are achievable to each state, rather than a top-down federal government approach which might complicate the systems and damage industries and businesses.
“This is a huge step toward dismantling the Obama Administration’s war on affordable energy,” said Myron Ebell, the director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “Repealing the CPP will spur new investment and create new jobs in energy-intensive manufacturing and resource industries. States will now not be forced to close coal-fired power plants or replace them with more expensive and less reliable types of energy.”
Tim Huelskamp, a former congressman who now runs the Heartland Institute, said that, “The war on fossil fuels is nearing an end. This is a wise, science-based decision by Administrator Scott Pruitt and President Donald Trump. The real winners here are not only coal miners and coal states, but all those Americans who simply can’t afford massive increases in their energy bills as a result of the Clean Power Plan.”