The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) new rule would raise electricity costs for Americans, kill manufacturing jobs, and disproportionately affect the poor, farmers, and small businesses.
Under the rule, the United States would become a less attractive location for energy-intensive manufacturing, and Americans’ electricity bills would rise.
This is the latest in a series of government attempts to reduce emissions—and power—from the nation’s energy-generating sector.
That’s why President Joe Biden’s EPA is trying another tactic to regulate emissions with this latest rule.
Rather than shutting down power plants by regulating regional emissions, as in 2015, the power plants would have to either comply with an unproven technology to sequester (or bury) 90 percent of their carbon dioxide emissions or close down.
President Obama issued his Clean Power Plan as a regulation because, despite sizable Democratic majorities in both chambers, Congress didn’t pass legislation to reduce emissions from power plants.
The American Clean Energy and Security Act, introduced in 2009 by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), and the American Power Act, introduced the next year by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), would have accomplished this, but neither proposal became law.
In the same way, President Biden’s plan to close power plants would not pass Congress, so he is trying to bring out a regulation to achieve the same goal.
However, this term, the Supreme Court is reconsidering the so-called Chevron doctrine, which now gives government agencies wide leeway to interpret laws. That decision is due in May or June.
In 2022, the Supreme Court found the first Clean Power Plan to be an example of “agencies asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted.”
“That discovery allowed it to adopt a regulatory program that Congress had conspicuously declined to enact itself,” he wrote.
Justice Neil Gorsuch concurred.
“The framers [of the Constitution] believed that the power to make new laws regulating private conduct was a grave one that could, if not properly checked, pose a serious threat to individual liberty,” he said.
Cleaner air and efficient power generation are worthwhile goals. But so is the security that comes from a healthy economy and the rule of law.
The Supreme Court, which struck down President Obama’s power plant rule in 2022, could well strike down President Biden’s version in the future.