From its first days, the Biden administration was using agencies to impose laws without congressional authority. The court noted it rejected the Biden administration’s use of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) to mandate 84 million Americans either obtain a Covid-19 vaccine or submit to weekly testing. It also discussed its rejection of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s asserted authority to impose a nationwide eviction moratorium to stem the spread of Covid. Recognizing that federal agencies “were asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted,” it took up the EPA’s efforts to impose a climate change law by regulation.

The EPA and environmentalists (at times referred to jointly as the “environmental community”) sought, without any specific statutory authority, to impose a  comprehensive and costly regulatory structure to address climate change. To determine the extent of the EPA’s authority, the Supreme Court took up a case brought by the state of West Virginia, West Virginia vs Environmental Protection Agency (WVA v. EPA).

The court reaffirmed the legislative power of Congress holding that agencies cannot legislate without specific congressional authority.

To resolve the issue of whether agencies can make new laws by regulation, the Supreme Court, for the first time, announced the “Major Question Doctrine,” for analyzing an agency’s authority to regulate. The court made clear that regulatory agencies can only act on matters of economic and political significance if the agency… point[s] to ‘clear congressional authority.’”

While the Supreme Court could have narrowly resolved the controversy (EPA’s “new found authority” to impose a cap-and-trade scheme for carbon emissions) using statutory construction, it recognized that many agencies were finding “vague language of a long-extant, but rarely used, statute[s]” as authority to regulate major economic and political issues without congressional authorization. The climate debate was the perfect set of facts for clarifying the roles of Congress and agencies.

Congress consistently rejected climate legislation

The court noted, “Congress, however, has consistently rejected proposals to amend the Clean Air Act to create such a program [regulating climate change].” It cited the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act of 2009, the Climate Protection Act of 2011, and Save our Climate Act of 2011. There were many more failed attempts by the environmental community to enact a comprehensive legal structure to address climate change: The Kyoto Protocol (Senate voted 95-0 against ratification), The Paris Agreement (Lacking votes, it was never submitted as a Treaty); McCain-Lieberman, Kerry-Lieberman-Graham, and others that never received a vote. Congress clearly spoke.

Efforts to make law by litigation

Realizing Congress would not impose a massive climate change scheme on American society, the environmental community orchestrated a nationwide litigation campaign to persuade courts to impose such a system. It filed lawsuits across the nation under any statute that might relate to climate change – Clean Air Act, (186), Endangered Species and other wildlife statutes (174), National Environmental Protection Act (322), Clean Water Act (58), miscellaneous land use statutes (168), constitutional claims under the Commerce Clause (20), First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments (41); under state laws (464), common law (29), public trust (27) and securities and financial statutes (24). The environmental community had some successes; however, its overreach ended in a defeat for the administrative state.

Using Executive Orders to make climate law

On Biden’s first day in office, he issued several Executive Orders to address climate change. Biden further directed all executive departments to place a moratorium on oil and gas leasing programs and establish the Social Cost of Carbon to justify the high cost of the regulatory structure. A week later, Biden ordered a whole-of-government approach to address climate change. This order was followed by the SEC’s proposed climate disclosure rules which again raise the question of identifying the needed congressional authority.

The futile regulatory march to circumvent Congress ends

While the environmental community worked for decades to impose a climate change law by regulation or litigation, it was the Biden administration’s sheer arbitrary use of the regulatory process that captured the Supreme Court’s attention.

As the environmental community was suffering legislative defeat after defeat, Obama’s EPA issued an “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases contributed to man-made climate change that may endanger public health and welfare.  This finding served as the foundation for the EPA’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) regulations, the issue decided in WVA v. EPA.  The CPP was a cap-and-trade rule. President Trump repealed the CPP and put in its place the Affordable Clean Energy rule that limited EPA’s regulatory power to available emission reduction technologies, consistent with the Clean Air Act. On Trump’s last day in office, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the Trump rule; however, before President Biden could reinstate a new CPP rule, the Supreme Court accepted the case for review.

The Supreme Court establishes regulatory sanity

While the Supreme Court held that “Congress could not have intended to delegate a decision of such economic and political significance (regulation of climate change) to an agency [EPA] in so cryptic of a fashion,” its decision limits the regulatory power of all agencies to enact major political and economic matters unless the agency can point to “clear congressional authority.”

Had the environmental community been successful in expanding the authority of agencies to regulate climate change without statutory authorization, many agencies would search for and find “long-extant authorities” to further diminish the role of Congress. By reaffirming the constitutional powers of Congress, and placing limits on the Executive’s power to legislate using the rulemaking process, the Supreme Court also solidified its role as a co-equal branch of our government.

The most gratifying aspect of the long battle over the power of EPA to regulate climate change is the ironic ending to the struggle. In the end, the EPA’s aggressive regulatory overreach resulted in limits being placed on the regulatory powers of all federal agencies.

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By Michael Bastasch

President Donald Trump will fulfill his campaign pledge to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, two sources with direct knowledge of the decision say.

Trump is working with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt and a small group of administration officials to work out how withdrawal will happen, Axios reported Wednesday. Trump is deciding between waiting three years to withdraw, as dictated by the accord, or pulling out of the United Nations overarching climate treaty.

Exiting the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has been championed by conservatives who want to make sure a future president can’t simply rejoin the Paris agreement, which 147 countries signed onto in 2016.

Pruitt met with Trump Tuesday to discuss the Paris accord, sparking a wave of speculation the president had decided to live up to his campaign promise. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the two discussed “the president’s upcoming decision of the Paris climate accords.”

“Ultimately, he wants a fair deal for the American people, and he will have an announcement on that shortly,” Spicer told reporters Tuesday.

Axios previously reported Trump told close confidantes he would pull out of the Paris agreement, despite calls from European leaders and some in his own administration to stay in the accord.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres made a last ditch attempt to keep Trump in the agreement during a speech at New York University Tuesday night. Guterres said countries that leave the Paris accord will be left behind.

“The sustainability train has left the station,” Guterres said. “Get on board or get left behind.”

Trump’s decision to leave, if true, would be a huge blow to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and White House aides Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn, all of whom pushed for the U.S. to remain in the Paris accord.

Conservative groups and Republican officials intensified their efforts to get Trump to withdraw from Paris in the past week. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and 21 other Republican Senators sent a letter to Trump in late May urging him to withdraw.

“We applaud you for your ongoing efforts to reduce over regulation in America,” the senators wrote. “To continue on this path, we urge you to make a clean exit from the Paris agreement so that your administration can follow through on its commitment to rescind the Clean Power Plan.”

Trump will announce his decision on the fate of U.S. involvement in the Paris agreement this week.

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By Andrew Follett

A top White House economic adviser said Thursday that keeping the Obama administration’s global warming pledge to the United Nations would be “highly crippling” to economic growth.

“We know that the levels that were agreed to by the prior administration would be highly crippling to the US economic growth,” chief economic adviser Gary Cohn said aboard Air Force One Thursday, referring to former President Barack Obama’s plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Paris climate agreement.

Obama pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. But that plan would be economically harmful, according to Cohn, and experts say they would not reduce emissions enough comply with the Paris agreement.

President Donald Trump promised to cancel the 2015 United Nations pact while on the campaign trail. Now, Trump says he will make a decision on the agreement following the G7 summit in Italy this week. Nearly 200 countries agreed to a U.N. deal in 2015.

“The president has told you that he’s going to ultimately make a decision on Paris and climate when he gets back,” Cohn said. “He’s interested to hear what the G7 leaders have to say about climate.”

Trump “wants to do the right thing for the environment,” Cohn said. “He cares about the environment. But he also cares very much about creating jobs for American workers.”

Even if Trump keeps the U.S. in the Paris global warming agreement, it will almost certainly fail.

The significant reductions to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions required by the agreement are extremely difficult to achieve due to the immense costs involved. Scientists estimate that simply limiting global warming to the Paris agreement targets would require the annual installation of 485,000 wind turbines by 2028. Only 13,000 turbines were installed in 2015, despite the enormous tax breaks and subsidies offered to wind power.

“It would require rates of change in our energy infrastructure and energy mix that have never happened in world history and that are extremely unlikely to be achieved,” Glenn Jones, a professor of marine sciences at Texas A&M who co-authored the study on the feasibility of the agreement, told Science Daily. “For a world that wants to fight climate change, the numbers just don’t add up to do it.”

The likely costs of the kind of wind and solar power program the scientists say would be necessary to actually slow global warming would be measured in the tens of trillions of dollars, and even then success would be far from assured. The scientists conclude that other methods of reducing CO2 emissions, such as significantly increasing the number of nuclear reactors, would run into political opposition from environmental groups.

Scientists’ conclusions are mirrored by Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy’s comments during a that the Clean Power Plan (CPP), her agency’s signature regulation aimed at tackling global warming, was meant to show “leadership” rather than actually prevent projected warming.

EPA repeatedly argued that the point of the Clean Power Plan was to show the world America was serious about tackling global warming in order to galvanize support for United Nations delegates to sign the Paris Agreement.

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By Sen. Rand Paul

It is my duty as a senator to uphold and defend the Constitution. One of my most important responsibilities in this role is to provide advice and consent on treaties, a check and balance on the Executive Branch. It gives us the opportunity to make sure the deals we’re signing up for are good for all Americans.

President Obama wanted to cement his legacy of environmentalism through the Paris Agreement on climate change. Obama also knew the Senate would never ratify the agreement, so he deliberately labeled it as an “executive agreement” to avoid the ratification process and unilaterally pledged the support of the United States with the stroke of a pen.

So what did Obama sign us up for in exchange for maybe reducing global temperature by 0.2°C by 2100? Experts predict that by 2040, the agreement could cost us 6.5 million lost jobs—a number significantly larger than the entire population of Kentucky. It will cost us $3 trillion in lost GDP. For each household, the average annual lost income could be as high as $4,900.

These numbers are jaw dropping. Why can’t we work toward a future that protects both our environment and our jobs? Why did the past administration always force the latter to be a martyr for the former?

Thankfully, President Trump has the opportunity to reverse course on Obama’s mistake.

The U.S. government should be beholden to one authority and one authority alone – our Constitution – and not some UN bureaucrats.

President Trump has delivered on almost all of his promises to have an America First energy plan. He has directed the EPA to suspend, revise, and rescind certain actions related to the Clean Power Plan. He has removed regulatory roadblocks to American energy independence, including signing the resolution Congress sent him to repeal the Stream Buffer rule. He has also instructed agencies to review existing administrative policies harming domestic energy production.

But there’s one missing piece to being truly America First, something President Trump promised on the campaign trail. He promised he would cancel the Paris Agreement as president. Can we really have an America First energy plan if we are needing to seek the endorsement of the U.N. as we make determinations about our country’s environmental and energy policies? The federal government should be beholden to one authority and one authority alone—our Constitution—and not some U.N. bureaucrats.

I ran for Senate to protect Kentucky jobs and restore the Kentucky coal industry from regulatory overreach. I stood right behind President Trump as he signed the bill I cosponsored to repeal the Stream Buffer rule.

I previously introduced a resolution requiring the Paris Agreement to be considered a treaty needing the Senate’s advice and consent. I am keeping my word to Kentuckians.

That is why I introduced a resolution Monday, with a companion resolution cosponsored by Congressman Andy Barr, calling on President Trump to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, an agreement which experts believe will not actually solve the environmental issues it was intended to address.

We founded our country on a system of checks and balances, and no president should have the unilateral authority to make such significant international commitments without input from Congress.

I look forward to President Trump following through on his promise to exit this agreement.

Republican Rand Paul represents Kentucky in the United States Senate.

EDITOR’s NOTE: The views expressed are those of the author, they are not representative of The Libertarian Republic or its sponsors. This Op/Ed was originally written for Fox News and is being used with expressed permission.

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By Chris White

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt said he doesn’t understand why so many activists defend what the agency chief called the Obama administration’s dodgy environmental record on water issues.

Pruitt, who sued the EPA more than a dozen times as Oklahoma’s attorney general, told reporters Wednesday that the Obama administration “deserved” to be sued for exceeding “their statutory authority.” He also said activists consistently gave the agency’s poor record on local environmental disasters a pass.

“What’s so great about that record?” he said, referring to the Obama administration’s handling of the Gold King Mine disaster and Flint water crisis. The EPA was roundly criticized during the latter half of former President Barack Obama’s final term for not reacting quicker on Flint.

The disaster Gold King Mine spill occurred when agency workers penetrated the mine in 2015, which unleashed three million gallons of toxic waste into the Animas River, poisoning drinking water for three states and the Navajo Nation.

Obama’s Justice Department refused to prosecute the employee responsible for the spill after the environmental agency Inspector General (IG) presented findings of a year-long investigation.

“I don’t quite understand the environmental left when they say that somehow what the past administration has done is so great,” he added. Democrats and activists praised Obama for spearheading policy measures such as the so-called Clean Power Plan and the Paris agreement, both of which were forged to fight climate change.

Pruitt said the former administration does not deserve the plaudits it has received, especially after the EPA’s failure to fix Flint’s water system.

Michigan officials were criticized last year for switching the small Eastern Michigan city’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River in a bid to save money. But the state applied the wrong regulations and standards for drinking water, which ultimately resulted in corroded pipes and an increased level of lead.

Nearly 2,000 citizens in Flint affected by lead poisoning sued the EPA for failing to take the proper steps to ensure that state and local authorities were addressing the crisis. The defendants are seeking a civil action lawsuit for $722 million in damages.

Pruitt is trying to refashion the EPA, transitioning the agency from one that fights man-made global warming to one that protects human health and the environment. His comments on Friday come as rumors the EPA is considering scuttling East Chicago’s Region 5 office have continued to abate.

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By Michael Bastasch

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said he sued the agency he heads so many times while Oklahoma attorney general because “they exceeded their statutory authority.”

“They deserved it and they deserved it because they exceeded their statutory authority, they exceeded their constitutional authority,” Pruitt told WDAY’s Rob Port Wednesday.

Pruitt was hammed by Democrats and environmental activists during the confirmation process for suing the EPA at least a dozen times while representing Oklahoma. Pruitt’s recused himself from litigation he brought against the Obama administration.

“When they got outside their lane, they got sued and they got stopped,” Pruitt said during the WDAY interview, not backing down from his record of suing EPA.

Pruitt sued EPA about a dozen times while Oklahoma AG, including filing suits on regulations he’s now reviewing, including the Clean Power Plan (CPP), the “waters of the U.S.” rule (WOTUS) and the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS).

Trump ordered EPA in March to review regulations that “potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources,” including the CPP. EPA later disclosed in a court filing they were also reviewing MATS.

The president ordered EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to rewrite the WOTUS rule in a “manner consistent with the opinion of Justice Antonin Scalia in Rapanos v. United States.”

But Pruitt wasn’t the only attorney general to sue the Obama EPA. Dozens of states sued EPA over the CPP, WOTUS and MATS. Pruitt was part of a 27-state coalition suing the CPP and a 28-state coalition suing over WOTUS.

Twenty states sued EPA to have the MATS rule overturned. Pruitt’s been consistent in saying he filed these suits because he saw these rules as federal overreach.

“They used the power of Washington, D.C. to coerce, to walk all over the states,” Pruitt told WDAY.

Pruitt wants states to play a larger role in environmental regulation. Pruitt recently approved North Dakota’s plan to create and administer its own implement and enforce its own carbon sequestration program.

“North Dakota is going to be the primary regulator of that,” Pruitt said, adding the state had been trying to create its own program for four years.

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The post Scott Pruitt Explains Why He Sued EPA So Many Times: ‘They Deserved It’ appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

The Obama administration has vowed to sign a United Nations global warming deal in April, despite intense opposition from the Senate and a Supreme Court ruling derailing the government’s green regulatory scheme.

“We’re going to go ahead and sign the agreement this year,” Todd Stern, the U.S.’s climate envoy told reporters Tuesday, brushing aside questions about last week’s Supreme Court ruling against the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) key climate regulation.

“It is entirely premature, really premature to assume the Clean Power Plan will be struck down but, even if it were, come what may, we are sticking to our plan to sign, to join,” Stern said of the EPA’s rule.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay against the EPA’s so-called Clean Power Plan — a regulatory scheme that aims to cut power plant carbon dioxide emissions 32 percent by 2030. The court’s decision was seen as a crippling blow to President Barack Obama’s global warming agenda.

The tragic death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, however, has cast a veil of uncertainty over the CPP’s fate. Environmentalists are worried the uncertainty will derail the U.N. global warming deal hashed out in Paris in December.

As part of that deal, the U.S. pledged to cut CO2 emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025 — a goal that can’t be met without the CPP. If the CPP is struck down by the courts or repealed by a future Republican president, the U.N. deal could fall apart.

“Justice Scalia’s death unquestionably leaves a large void, but it’s difficult to predict the impact his absence will have on any specific issue, including our challenge of the EPA’s Power Plan,” Curtis Johnson, spokesman for West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Scalia’s successor and the president who ultimately prevails in naming that person remain unknown. In fact, the election of a president may have even greater impact given that person may rescind the Power Plan,” Johnson said.

But the Supreme Court is only part of Obama’s problem. The administration is also moving ahead with a deal that’s opposed by the Republican-controlled Senate.

The Obama administration has gone to great lengths to not call the U.N. Paris deal a treaty so it doesn’t need Senate approval. Bringing the deal before the Senate would almost certainly mean defeat.

Even as Obama himself attended the U.N.’s Paris summit, Congress passed legislation to repeal the CPP.

“It brings me great joy for the Senate to come together in a majority, bipartisan vote to disapprove of this economically disastrous carbon mandate from the administration,” Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe said of the votes last year.

Stern, however, argues that even Republicans will be hesitant to back out of the U.N. deal once it’s signed in April.

“Paris was seen as such a landmark, hard-fought, hard-won deal that, for the U.S. to turn round and say we will withdraw, that would inevitably give the country a kind of diplomatic black eye that I think a president of any party would be very loath to do,” Stern said.

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The Environmental Protection Agency finally published a regulation that will be the backbone of President Barack Obama’s plan to fight global warming: a sweeping rule called the Clean Power Plan.

Attorneys general from 26 states and numerous business groups, however, aren’t going to stand idly by while EPA regulations threaten the closure of hundreds of coal-fired power plants across the country. A deluge of legal challenges to the Clean Power Plan (CPP) have been filed, alleging the rule violates the Clean Air Act.

On the political side, a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers are pushing legislation to derail the CPP and force the EPA to go back to the drawing board on how it will regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

States and industries representing tens of millions of Americans are rising up the stop Obama’s global warming agenda. It’s a legal effort that rivals the fight against the Affordable Care Act, and one that will likely find its way to the Supreme Court.

EPA Publishes Its Rule To End Coal Power

A slew of lawsuits almost immediately smacked the EPA Friday when it published its final version of the CPP in the Federal Register.

First a coalition of 24 states, led by the attorneys general of West Virginia and Texas, filed suit against the EPA, alleging the CPP violated the Clean Air Act because the agency was now regulating power plants under two sections of the law — which it can’t do.

Oklahoma and North Dakota quickly joined those 24 when they filed suit, also arguing the EPA’s rule re-regulated power plants under the Clean Air Act.

“It’s an attempt by the administration to transfer decision-making on the fuels used to generate power from state policy makers to bureaucrats at the EPA,” Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a Republican, said in a statement.

States suing the EPA also said the CPP would cause electricity prices to spike as coal plants around the country that can’t comply with the rule are shut down and replaced with more expensive natural gas plants or green energy power sources.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), for example, found “energy costs for customers may increase by up to 16% by 2030 due to the CPP alone.”

Energy industry-backed studies claim the CPP could cost Americans between $37 billion a year and $58 billion per year.

“The results will be financially harmful for states, and consumers ultimately will pay the price through much-higher utility rates and a less reliable power supply,” Pruitt said.

But not all states are against the CPP. A coalition of 15 states, led by New York’s attorney general, plan on intervening in any lawsuit filed against the CPP. These states will also be joined by Washington, D.C., and New York City — both of which have spent lots of tax dollars on green energy.

It’s not just states suing the EPA, however, as they’ve been joined by a coalition of 16 business groups representing a wide range of industries, from paper products to refiners to coal producers. The suit, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is also asking federal courts to block the rule from implementation while it’s being challenged.

“Not only are these regulations bad for our economy, they also represent a massive executive power grab,” Tom Donohue, the Chamber’s president, said in a statement. “EPA completely bypassed the legislative branch, basing its 2,000-page rule on roughly 300 words in the Clean Air Act and including a host of policies that have already been considered and rejected by Congress.”

The CPP has already withstood two legal challenges in federal court this year. The EPA came away from both cases unscathed because judges ruled the CPP needed to be published in the Federal Register before it could be challenged.

EPA and environmentalists maintain the rule can withstand any legal challenge thrown at it because of the “flexibility” the rule gives to states to cut carbon dioxide emissions. EPA is also handing out incentives to states that move quickly to cut emissions the agency blames for causing global warming.

“We are confident we will again prevail against these challenges and will be able to work with states to successfully implement these first-ever national standards to limit carbon pollution the largest source of carbon emissions in the United States,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said Friday.

Congress Isn’t Happy

Federal lawmakers have also been busy this past week pushing legislation to derail the CPP.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, promised to file a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) this coming week to challenge the CPP.

Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican, and Heidi Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat, will file a separate CRA resolution to challenge the EPA’s rule.

“I have vowed to do all I can to fight back against this Administration on behalf of the thousands of Kentucky coal miners and their families, and this CRA is another tool in that battle,” McConnell said Friday. “The CRAs that we will file will allow Congress the ability to fight these anti-coal regulations.”

The CRA allows Congress to overturn a regulation imposed by a federal agency after it’s been published in the Federal Register. A CRA resolution only needs 51 votes to pass the Senate, meaning Democrats wouldn’t be able to filibuster the bill, but any legislative effort to kill the CPP is likely to meet an Obama veto.

Congress can override, but that would require 67 votes in the Senate. CPP critics are unlikely to persuade the necessary 11 Democrats to join their cause.

On the House side, Kentucky Republican Rep. Ed Whitfield will file a CRA resolution against the CPP which is likely to pass, but Whitfield may not be able to convince as many as 43 Democrats to override an Obama veto.

Is This The End Of Coal?

The CPP aims to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants 32 percent by 2030 as part of Obama’s Climate Action Plan. In anticipation, the EPA is forcing states to submit plans on how they’ll cut CO2 and ramp up green energy production.

The Obama administration hopes the CPP and other rules will convince the world the U.S. is serious about tackling global warming and encouraging other major economies, like China and India, to cut their emissions.

Aside from trying to appease other countries, the EPA claims the CPP will yield $26 billion to $45 billion in net health and climate benefits from fewer power plants. EPA also claims that shuttering power plants will reduce traditional air pollutants and avoid “3,600 premature deaths … 1,700 heart attacks” and “90,000 asthma attacks” every year.

In contrast to energy industry studies, EPA says its rule will only cost about $8 billion a year and actually cause electricity prices to fall after 2030 due to energy efficiency programs.

At the same time, EPA admits the CPP will raise electricity prices 5 percent by 2030 and cause coal production to collapse by 25 percent. EPA also projects  as many as 34,000 jobs could be lost by 2030 as the coal industry contacts.

But other studies show EPA could be vastly underestimating the CPP’s costs. A study by the U.S. Energy Information Administration — an arm of the Energy Department — found the CPP will increase electricity prices 3 percent to 7 percent by 2025 from increased natural gas prices.

On a regional level, however, electricity prices increases could be more severe. EIA noted in “Florida and the Southeast, the Southern Plains, and the Southwest regions the projected electricity prices in 2030 are roughly 10% above baseline.”

EIA also found that coal production will collapse 30 percent in the next decade as 90 gigawatts of coal-fired power capacity is shuttered due to the CPP and other EPA rules.

But even EIA’s estimates may underestimate the impacts on Americans. A National Black Chamber of Commercestudy published in June claims the CPP will “increase Hispanic poverty by more than 26% and Black poverty by more than 23%” as energy prices increase.

The NBCC study found Americans will pay $565 billion more for energy every year by 2030 than in 2012 because of the CPP — that’s a 121 percent increase in power prices. The study also found the CPP will “[r]equire the average family to pay over $1,225 more for power and gas in 2030 than they did in 2012.”

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The Environmental Protection Agency will publish Friday the long awaited Clean Power Plan, opening the climate rules up to legal challenges from the states.

Anticipating a wave of lawsuits including a group of 16 states that have organized to sue, EPA Assistant Administrator Janet McCabe released a statement Thursday reiterating the administration’s belief that the lawsuits have no legal basis and will not hold up in court, reports The Washington Examiner.

“The Clean Power Plan is based on a sound legal and technical foundation, and it was shaped by extensive input from states, industry, energy regulators, health and environmental groups and individual members of the public from across this country,” said McCabe. “As a result, the plan is fair, flexible, affordable and designed to reflect the fast-growing trends toward cleaner American energy.”

It’s taken nearly three months to publish the rules however, despite the plan being unveiled on August 3. According to The Hill, critics have accused the EPA of hiding behind procedure and trying to delay challenges to the rule, as lawsuits can only occur once the rule has been officially published.

McCabe denied the allegations Thursday, saying, “This is a routine, standard process that we do every time a rule is finalized,” adding that, “This actually moved along quite rapidly, considering the length of the rule and the fact that there were three packages.”

The Clean Power Plan seeks to reduce carbon emissions in the energy sector by 32 percent by 2030, and shift the industry towards renewable sources. The Hill reports that the full plan will appear Friday in the Federal Register.

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