Cleaning Up the Clean Power Plan

As John noted on Friday, a federal appeals court has blocked for the time being the EPA’s brazen extension of the Clean Water Act. What about its equally brazen extension of the Clean Air Act into a lever for the de facto nationalization of the nation’s electric utility industry? It is facing a legal challenge, too, and the legal arguments are typically arcane. I have no idea whether it will succeed or not. But it is a measure of the deep cynicism of the Obama EPA that they probably don’t care that much, because while the legal appeals grind slowly on, the relatively short deadlines for the states to submit their compliance plans will cause a lot of electric utilities to begin changing their business plans, such that even if the “Clean Power Plan” is eventually blocked in court, the environmentalists will have got a lot of what they want.

David Schnare, a former EPA enforcement lawyer and now general counsel of the Energy and Environment Legal Institute (they’re the good guys) talked to Power Line for a few moments about what strategy states ought to adopt to fight this ukase. It’s a little technical, but I think he’s on to something:

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses