WASHINGTON — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released today its proposed greenhouse gas emissions rule on new coal and natural gas-fired power plants. Institute for Energy Research President Thomas Pyle released the following statement in response to the proposed rule:
“The only impact that today’s announced rule will have is on the pocketbooks of American consumers who will pay skyrocketing electricity costs while the White House follows a failed German model to direct the U.S. economy away from our affordable and abundant coal and natural gas resources to expensive and unreliable renewables. Make no mistake: the Obama EPA is reading verbatim from the Sierra Club’s radical playbook to move the United States beyond coal and natural gas.
“There are a number of problems with today’s announced rule. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is intentionally evading its statutory responsibility to analyze the costs and benefits of the new regulation by claiming that the economics of coal and natural gas mean that energy producers would meet the goals of the regulation with or without the new rule. This is incredibly disingenuous. Why would the administration spend taxpayer money and agency time to write a rule that has no practical impact whatsoever. Once again, the EPA’s transparency is called into question.
“Second, the EPA claims that the costly new technology to drive coal-fired power plants under the new emissions standards is available. Of course, the power plants EPA cites to prove its point have received millions of dollars in federal subsidies. To use federally-funded pilot programs as the basis for a universal standard for America’s baseload electricity supply is not only foolish, it is possibly illegal.
“Finally, the stated EPA goal for this rule is to reduce the impacts of climate change. Where, then, is EPA’s analysis of how this rule will reduce the most often cited impacts of climate change, namely reductions in global temperature and sea level rise?”
###
