The Obama administration is set to propose thousands of new energy regulations targeted at global warming in 2016, according to a Politico report Monday.
The new regulations are likely to help implement Obama’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) and include everything from Department of Energy efficiency measures to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules on pipeline safety and fuel efficiency for trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles.
Obama may only have until May of 2016 to issue the new regulations, as anything later would allow Congress to reject the rules under the Congressional Review Act.
The next year will also be a critical one for Obama’s previous energy regulations in court. Obama’s CPP faces lawsuits from 26 different states, which claim the plan is a federal takeover of state resource and energy policies.
“As Attorney General, I have a responsibility to protect the lives of millions of working families, the elderly and the poor, from such illegal and unconscionable Federal Government actions,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a statement announcing his state’s lawsuit.
A professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that argued the plan was unconstitutional. President Barack Obama has already stated that he intends to use “executive authority” in order to institute the CPP over the objections of Congress.
The plan attempts to reduce global warming by cutting carbon emissions from the energy sector. It is intended to reduce 32 percent of these carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 by forcing companies to use unreliable, costly, and deeply flawed solar and wind power.
Texas, one of the states legally challenging the CPP, found that the plan could force 4,000 megawatts of coal-fired power capacity to retire. The retirement would make it both difficult and expensive to reliably provide electricity to the state’s citizens.The plan alone is expected to cost a staggering $41 billion annually. Yet, even if implemented full scale, it likely won’t have a major impact on global warming. According to analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute using EPA models, CPP will only advert 0.019° Celsius of warming by the year 2100, an amount so small it can’t be detected.
The EPA actually omitted the amount of warming the CPP will prevent from the agency’s analysis of regulatory impacts. EPA admits it assesses the plan’s benefits “qualitatively because we do not have sufficient confidence in available data or methods.”
