AUSTIN – The Texas Public Policy Foundation today announced that it joined 32 national and state free market organizations in supporting a call by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for states to refuse to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) request that Texas submit a state implementation plan for the Clean Power Plan.

In a letter written to every state, Senator McConnell urged governors to carefully review the consequences before complying with EPA's request. He argues that EPA's plan is on shaky legal grounds, will be extremely costly, and does little to address its purported global warming aims.

"EPA's plan is literally a power grab," said Doug Domenech, Director of TPPF's Fueling Freedom Project. "The Federal agency wants to take control of our Texas power generation system in such a way that greatly raises costs on all Texans while threatening our electric reliability. The plan disproportionately hurts Texas and our economy by reshaping energy production capacity likely forcing 19-25 coal plants to close, and proposes that Texas increase renewable energy capacity by 153 percent.”

"Texas would be burdened far more than any other state, and compliance with the Clean Power Plan mandates would require extensive changes in Texas law, including a re-regulation of Texas' competitive electrical market," said Kathleen Hartnett White, TPPF Distinguished Senior Fellow and Director of the Armstrong Center for Energy and the Environment.

Additionally, Director of TPPF's Center for Tenth Amendment Action Dr. Thomas Lindsay’s commentary, "Mitch McConnell Takes On the EPA," was published in Real Clear Policy yesterday. In it he writes:

It is not difficult to understand Texas's opposition to the Clean Power Plan. According to one study, the CPP would impose ‘by far, greater economic harm’ on Texas ‘than any other state,’ raising the average Texas household's electricity and gas bills ‘by more than 54 percent by 2020.’ In real dollars, the average Texas household's annual power and gasbills would rise by $1,060 as a result of the CPP."

To read the full text of Senator Mitch McConnell's letter to the Governors, visit:http://txpo.li/1a5WM6P

Doug Domenech is director of the Fueling Freedom Project at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and former secretary of natural resources for the Commonwealth of Virginia. He also served as deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Department of the Interior, the nation's principal conservation, natural resource, and science agency. 

Kathleen Hartnett White is distinguished senior fellow-in-residence and the director of the Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment, and former chairman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (2001-2007).
 
Thomas K. Lindsay, Ph.D., is Director of the Center for 10th Amendment Action and the Center for Higher Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He is a former deputy chairman and chief operating officer of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has more than two decades of experience in higher education management and instruction.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin, Texas.

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