Click Banner For More Info See All Sponsors

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish!

This site is now closed permanently to new posts.
We recommend you use the new Townsy Cafe!

Click anywhere but the link to dismiss overlay!

Results 1 to 1 of 1

  • Share this thread on:
  • Follow: No Email   
  • Thread Tools
  1. TopTop #1
    Barry's Avatar
    Barry
    Founder & Moderator

    The War on Coal is about to go nuclear

    While the Keystone Pipeline has been getting all the press and stirring activists' emotions on both sides, the net effect of it's passing, aside from potent symbolism, is relatively small. By far the more important real change in the air is Obama's EPA's regulations to reduce carbon pollution. This would have a large effect of both reducing carbon and restructuring the nation's energy production. This is the most important climate action on the agenda now.

    It's no surprise that Mitch McConnell, of coal state Kentucky, is against it, but what is a surprise is his unorthodox campaign to stop it, including reaching out to all 50 state governors.

    The battle is joined. The stakes are enormous, in dollars, climate and politics.

    I've included two articles below, the first is the New York Times summary of the McConnells effort, and the second is McConnell's fear mongering and distorted logic presented in his opening salvo in the press.

    Barry



    McConnell Urges States to Help Thwart Obama’s ‘War on Coal’

    https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/u...r-on-coal.html

    By CORAL DAVENPORT

    WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has begun an aggressive campaign to block President Obama’s climate change agenda in statehouses and courtrooms across the country, arenas far beyond Mr. McConnell’s official reach and authority.

    The campaign of Mr. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is aimed at stopping a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations requiring states to reduce carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

    Once enacted, the rules could shutter hundreds of coal-fired plants in what Mr. Obama has promoted as a transformation of the nation’s energy economy away from fossil fuels and toward sources like wind and solar power. Mr. McConnell, whose home state is one of the nation’s largest coal producers, has vowed to fight the rules.

    Since Mr. McConnell is limited in how he can use his role in the Senate to block regulations, he has taken the unusual step of reaching out to governors with a legal blueprint for them to follow to stop the rules in their states. Mr. McConnell’s Senate staff, led by his longtime senior energy adviser, Neil Chatterjee, is coordinating with lawyers and lobbying firms to try to ensure that the state plans are tangled up in legal delays.

    On Thursday, Mr. McConnell sent a detailed letter to every governor in the United States laying out a carefully researched legal argument as to why states should not comply with Mr. Obama’s regulations. In the letter, Mr. McConnell wrote that the president was “allowing the E.P.A. to wrest control of a state’s energy policy.”

    To make his case, Mr. McConnell is also relying on a network of powerful allies with national influence and roots in Kentucky or the coal industry. Within that network is Laurence H. Tribe, a highly regarded scholar of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a former mentor of Mr. Obama’s. Mr. Tribe caught Mr. McConnell’s attention last winter when he was retained to write a legal brief for Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal producer, in a lawsuit against the climate rules.

    In the brief, Mr. Tribe argued that Mr. Obama’s use of the existing Clean Air Act to put forth the climate change regulations was unconstitutional. He then echoed that position in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal. He argued that in requiring states to cut carbon emissions, and thus to change their energy supply from fossil fuels to renewable sources, the agency is asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority.

    Peabody Energy has been the fourth-largest contributor to Mr. McConnell’s election campaigns over the course of his political career, and his office maintains close and frequent communication with the company.

    In addition to stopping state-level enactment of the climate rules, Mr. McConnell’s strategy is intended to undercut Mr. Obama’s position internationally as he tries to negotiate a global climate change treaty to be signed in Paris in December. The idea is to create uncertainty in the minds of other world leaders as to whether the United States can follow through on its pledges to cut emissions.

    “We’ve seen modern lobbying strategies that become a very large campaign, coordinated with states and localities, but we’ve never seen a Senate majority leader or House speaker in front of it,” said James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University in Washington. “It’s quite clever. It’s sophisticated and unusual.”

    Continues here



    McConnell Urges States to Help Thwart Obama’s ‘War on Coal’
    BY MITCH MCCONNELL
    March 3, 2015

    The Obama administration's so-called "clean power" regulation seeks to shut down more of America's power generation under the guise of protecting the climate.

    In reality, this proposed regulation would have a negligible effect on global climate but a profoundly negative impact on countless American families already struggling.

    The regulation is unfair. It's probably illegal. And state officials can do something about it; in fact, many are already fighting back.

    I'm calling for others to join. Here's why. Every state has the power, in theory at least, to design its own approach to meet the excessive and arbitrary mandates imposed by this regulation. But the purported flexibility is actually illusory.

    States report that the regulation's mandates are not technologically achievable, cannot be implemented under rushed timelines and threaten both state economies and energy reliability for families. Moreover, the regulation actually punishes states for billions they've already invested in environmental upgrades.

    And yet, the Obama administration is still threatening to impose its own — presumably more draconian — plan on any state that doesn't do as it's told. It sounds like a scary outcome. But states shouldn't be frightened, nor should they allow themselves to be bullied.

    For starters, the legal basis for this regulation is flimsy at best. As iconic left-leaning law professor Laurence Tribe put it, the administration's effort goes "far beyond its lawful authority." And even in the unlikely event that the regulation does pass legal muster, it's difficult to conceive how a plan imposed from Washington would be much different from what a state might develop on its own.

    Since the Obama administration has already decreed that it will be the judge of whether a plan is acceptable or not, it's hard to see the White House agreeing to much that diverges from its ideological agenda.

    Just consider how extreme this regulation is. According to a respected group of economists, the regulation could cost our country about a third of a trillion dollars in compliance costs and cause electricity price hikes in nearly every state.

    Continues here

    | Login or Register (free) to reply publicly or privately   Email

  2. Gratitude expressed by 2 members:

Similar Threads

  1. Replies: 0
    Last Post: 03-25-2011, 10:49 PM
  2. Replies: 0
    Last Post: 03-24-2011, 04:45 PM
  3. Faster than any oil or coal
    By Braggi in forum WaccoReader
    Replies: 6
    Last Post: 06-26-2008, 12:21 AM
  4. Replies: 0
    Last Post: 02-01-2006, 01:53 PM

Bookmarks