TPPF’s Mario Loyola publishes study on EPA’s Clean Power Plan

Today TPPF Senior Fellow Mario Loyola published a groundbreaking new study, "EPA's Unprecedented Power Grab," in the spring 2015 issue of National Affairs. The study discusses the EPA's Clean Power Plan, which is due to be finalized this summer. 

“Under the cover of a regulation of carbon emissions, the EPA seeks to pave the way for the cap-and-trade scheme that Congress rejected,” said Loyola. “In order to accomplish this feat, the Clean Power Plan coerces states to reorganize their production, transmission, and consumption of electricity, and delegate to EPA the power to enforce the new state rules. EPA seeks authority to regulate matters that lie outside its statutory authority under the Clean Air Act, by threatening to ruin the states’ economies, and forcibly shut down a large fraction of electricity production, if state governments do not pledge to do EPA’s bidding.

"The Clean Power Plan is unconstitutionally coercive of the states in a way the Supreme Court has never upheld. It presents the states with a choice between two unconstitutionally coercive techniques, which as the Supreme Court has said is no choice at all. And its coercive threat — economic ruin and forced blackouts that would endanger health and safety, is unprecedented and unconscionable." 

“The Plan targets Texas in an unprecedented way,” said Texas Public Policy Foundation Distinguished Senior Fellow-in-Residence and Director of the Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment Kathleen Hartnett White. “Texas has the most efficient power sector in the world, and the youngest and cleanest coal fleet in the country. Only 17 states have a lower carbon emissions rate than Texas, yet Texas is expected to shoulder the burden of 18 percent of the national total emissions reduction under the Plan. It will have to shutter more coal-fired power than the next nine major coal-electricity states.

“The plan faces serious constitutional and statutory hurdles, and EPA has failed to demonstrate that the plan would have any health or environmental benefits at all. States must refuse to be complicit in EPA's power grab, and must refuse to cooperate with the plan in any way.” 

To read the full essay, visit: http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/epas-unprecedented-power-grab