Good day all. As I’ve written in the past, the Environmental Protection Agency has been running out of control for over a decade. They have been repeatedly slapped down by the courts for going far beyond their mandates.
The problem is the EPA is run by fanatics who consider things like the Constitution and Congressional oversight to be annoyances that they can ignore. With their latest regulatory overreach threatening to black out whole regions, the states and businesses have had enough and are going after the EPA with every tool in their legal arsenals. Here are some of the details from Fox News:
The legal barrage to halt the Environmental Protection Agency’s radical Clean Power Plan has begun. A broad coalition of U.S. industry and business, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and an armada of other business and industry organizations, has asked the D.C. District of the federal Court of Appeals to prevent any further action on the Plan until the court can decide its overall legal status.
And just what has the EPA done to cause this action? Ignoring congress for one thing.
The coalition filed a motion at their first opportunity on Friday to stay EPA’s long-awaited final rule governing the plan, immediately after the agency published the rule in the Federal Register—the official birth notice of the long-gestating plan to drastically remake the entire U.S. electrical system, and among other things create a nationwide trading system for carbon emissions that was blocked by the Senate in 2009.
The EPA is utterly unqualified to have anything to do with the electrical grid in the country. There is an organisation that is specifically set up to deal with the electrical grid. It’s called FERC. (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) As to that carbon trading garbage? There is a reason congress ordered them to drop it. It’s nothing but a fraud and a means to enrich the Friends of the EPA at the expense of everyone else.
The business coalition argues that a huge, unprecedented and illegal expansion of EPA authority over the country’s entire electrical power system will cause “irreparable harm” unless complicated planning process ordained by the rule is halted while that legal battle over the entire program is fought, a process likely to last through most of 2016, if not longer.
They aren’t kidding that these rules pushed out by the EPA will cause irreparable harm. It will force essentially all the coal fired power generation plants to shut down with nothing available to take up the slack. Right now the grid is starting to run short of power and we are accessing the reserves far more deeply than the power companies like.
As a motion by 24 states to the appeals court puts it, an “unprecedented, unlawful attempt by an environmental regulator to reorganize the nation’s energy grid” is intended to force the States and other bodies to make “immediate” and irreversible decisions to plan compliance with EPA’s rule before courts have ruled whether the plan is legal or not.
The EPA doesn’t care about any of this. They don’t care what the courts have said or will say and they don’t care what Congress has told them to do. The agency is out of control and in full runaway mode.
The opponents argue that in broad legal terms, EPA’s plan depends on the selective misinterpretation of some 300 words in the Clean Air Act that have never previously been used to regulate carbon emissions in such sweeping fashion.
The interpretation of little-known section 111 (d) of the Clean Air Act extends far beyond the setting of standards for individual sources—which the opponents argue is the sole basis of the law—to push states and regions into enforcing the cuts on a much more sweeping basis.
As I understand it, the EPA has essentially ordered the states to force compliance of their rules. The states see this as a classic violation of the 10th Amendment, not to mention that the rules will cause blackouts and literally turn areas of the country into 3rd world hellholes.
Under the rule, U.S. states have until September 2016 to create plans that implement customized levels of carbon emission reductions established by EPA, or seek a 2-year extension if that proves impossible. EPA decides if they get the extension, but adds that those granted the reprieve must provide an update of their plans in 2017.
There are already several states that are outright refusing to comply.
States that do not come up with plans that EPA deems satisfactory, or choose not to follow the new rules, will get EPA-designed plans instead—none of which have so far been seen.
I can almost guarantee that not one of the plans that do get submitted will be acceptable.
Those deadlines, both states and business groups argue, are largely intended to force states to choose in advance to shut down at a minimum roughly 11,000 megawatts of U.S. coal-fired power states by 2016, force mammoth reliance on new and unproven sources of renewable energy, and likely undercut the stability of the entire national U.S. electricity supply—and even then force suppliers to use a cap-and-trade system of emissions reduction certificates to stave off some of the drastic changes.
It took some digging, but if I’m reading this correctly, the United States generates about 1060 Gigawatts of electricity. (Summer output) We use all of that power. Dropping 11k Megawatts out of the grid will cause brownouts, rolling blackouts and in some areas, permanent blackouts. This will mean that businesses of all types will have to close down, homes will not have electricity at critical periods and the standard of living will plummet. The EPA doesn’t give a damn
For its part, EPA has argued, in the words of EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, that its new rule “has strong scientific and legal foundations, provides states with broad flexibilities to design and implement plans, and is clearly within EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act.”
The agency has also declared that it “provided unprecedented outreach before and after the proposed Plan was issued,” and considered 4.3 million comments in response to the proposal.
McCarthy has pointed to the two-year extension in the planning process for the huge energy makeover as proof of EPA’s flexibility and the reasonableness of the planning process. “States and utilities told us they needed more time, and we listened,” she declared on an in-house blog.
Sure they listened. They listened to the states in the same way a parent listens to a 2 year old.
The business groups rejoinder is that while their comments were filed, they weren’t taken into account. Evidently, a majority of U.S. states—at least 26 out of 49 affected—to a significant extent agree.
One problem with the courts is that way to many of the judges are big leftwing types that believe that the Federal Government should rule over the states. If and when this makes it to the Supreme Court, you can be certain that the 4 leftists on the bench will rule in favor of the EPA.
If Obama manages to get one or two more justices on the court, The EPA’s tyrannical power grab will stand. At that point, the constitution and rule of law will end, and you will see states outright refusing to comply. If that point is reached, well, the term that is most commonly used is, “Game ON!”
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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