he president has promised to veto the congressional resolutions… Over 600 Democrat politicians from 32 states have joined together to oppose the centerpiece of Pres. Obama’s climate change agenda, the Clean Power Plan.
“As Democrats committed to a prosperous America and a healthy environment, we believe the United States has a unique opportunity to lead the world in addressing the global climate challenge, and yet do so, as we must, without unduly burdening the American economy or the American people,” the Democratic coalition called CoalBlue said in a letter sent Tuesday to Obama.
“The letter was signed by 626 state and local officials from nearly three dozen states, including 177 state legislators, 278 local elected officials and 148 Democratic Party officials,” the Washington Examinerreports.
These leaders believe the Environmental Protection Agency’s new rules regarding carbon emissions will cause great harm to the economy:
Unfortunately, the EPA’s recently published rules for new and existing electric generating units severely miss the mark in many important regards. Taken together, they endanger the continued development of critical carbon-mitigating technologies necessary to achieve sustainability, threaten the reliability of the U.S. power grid, and place significant economic burdens on the American economy and the American people, in the form of higher energy costs and a potentially less reliable electric grid, without achieving any meaningful reductions in global CO2 emissions.
“The EPA, while well intentioned, has lost sight of the importance of preserving affordable and reliable energy in its pursuit of clean energy,” the Democrat leaders add.
As reported by Western Journalism, the EPA’s Clean Power Plan calls for a 30 percent reduction in CO2 emissions by the nation’s power industry by 2030.
The energy sources that will be impacted the most by the new regulations are coal and natural gas. Currently, the United States derives 39 percent of its energy from coal, 27 percent from natural gas, 19 percent from nuclear, 6 percent from hydroelectric, and 7 percent from other renewables (mostly wind power).
The president has stated that his plans for the energy sector will necessarily cause utility rates to “skyrocket“ and result in the closure of coal-fired power plants.
The Heritage Foundation released a study last fall that found the EPA regulations the Obama administration has announced in order to achieve its climate change goals would reduce the United States’ Gross Domestic Product by $2.5 trillion by 2030. Further, employment levels would “track nearly 300,000 jobs below the no-carbon-regulation baseline in an average year, with some years seeing an employment deficit of more than 1 million jobs.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that a typical U.S. household could lose about $3,400 in disposable income per year, with a combined loss for all households of $586 billion by 2030, due to Obama’s new EPA climate change regulations.
The report by the Institute for Energy Research concludes that the “EPA’s regulations impose huge costs for small benefits. The agency’s ozone rule could be the single costliest regulation in U.S. history…Meanwhile, EPA’s CO2 rule will impose double-digit electricity rate hikes for residents of 43 states, but limit global warming by just 0.02 degrees Celsius. The solution is for EPA to withdraw its proposed ozone and CO2 rules.”
The Senate voted last week for two resolutions (both 52-48) blocking the implementation of Obama’s Clean Power Plan (CPP), with Democrats Joe Machin (W.Va.) and Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) siding with Republicans. The House will likely take up the resolutions next week, while the president travels to Paris to take part in the U.N. Conference on Climate Change. The White House has promised Obama will veto the congressional resolutions.
Twenty-four states have joined together to sue the Obama’s EPA to block implementation of a new CPP rule regarding CO2 emissions.