Think Progress
May 24, 2016
To plan, or not to plan?
That’s not the question for West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who is already fighting the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon rule in court and has now submitted a letter to the agency, warning it not to help other states plan how they will comply with the rule.
The Clean Power Plan (CPP), finalized by the EPA last summer, requires states to lower emissions from their electricity sectors. While the plan is flexible, the goals will be accomplished largely through reducing dependence on coal and increasing renewable energy generation. In their suit, Morrisey and attorneys general from 25 other states allege that the EPA does not have the authority to regulate carbon emissions under a specific statute of the Clean Air Act.
In February, the Supreme Court issued a stay of the rule. The ruling came just days before Justice Antonin Scalia died, and his replacement is seen by both sides as critical for the court’s ultimate ruling on the plan, which is a key part of the Obama administration’s efforts to help the United States meet its carbon reduction commitments under the Paris agreement.
“The entire point of the Supreme Court’s extraordinary action in putting a stop to the Power Plan was to preserve the status quo pending the outcome of the litigation,” Morrisey and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton write in the letter, released Monday but dated May 16. “EPA should respect that action by leaving things the way they are until the courts have had their say.”
They also argue that the EPA is wasting federal resources on something that may never go forward.
“We urge you to consider that you are spending scarce resources on a rule that the Supreme Court has indicated raises serious legal questions,” the letter reads. “For that reason, if no other, numerous states have put their pencils down following the stay order.”
The rule has split the states, with at least 17 intervening in support of the plan another another 26 fighting it.
The 26 states that are suing the EPA are doing so even though the CPP is broadly supported by the American public. In fact, support for the plan drops below 50 percent in only three states, all of which are party to the suit.
The letter from Morrisey and Paxton was released the same day Morrissey told reporters in D.C. that killing the CPP would lead to “more coal jobs.”
“We all know the cause of coal’s decline is multifaceted, but the regulatory regime, certainly from my perspective, has played a very important role,” Morrisey said. “If you can reverse some of the regulatory carnage we have seen, then there is an opportunity to at least come back.”
But, according to a non-partisan think tank, the plan will create many more jobs than reversing coal’s decline — with all the environmental implications that go along with it — would. In a report issued last summer, the Economic Policy Institute found that by 2020, the CPP will create nearly 100,000 more jobs than are lost.
Frank Knapp, the co-chair of the American Sustainable Business Council, said that Morrisey’s comments were driven not by the prospect of coal jobs, but by the desire for coal profits.
“The advocates for reviving the coal industry, now down to less than 90,000 miners nationally, never complained about more productive workers or new technology when those factors allowed the coal companies to shed workers,” Knapp wrote in a blog post Tuesday. Speculating on how many jobs might be created, he wrote: “Would that number be 5000, 3000, 1000 or some other number of additional miners? Or, more than likely, no new mining jobs because the existing workers could probably handle any minimal increase in coal demand.”
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/05/24/3781301/morrissey-tells-epa-to-stop-working-on-cpp/