Kill the lawless, baseless Clean Power Plan

The Clean Power Plan was a naked executive overreach riding on the back of alarmist manipulation of climate science. Anyone concerned with good government, the energy sector, or sound science should applaud the administration’s actions.

To battle smog and air toxins, Congress in 1963 passed the Clean Air Act and updated it in 1970 and repeatedly after that. Under this law, the EPA can regulate pollution from factories and impose mandates on states. Carbon dioxide was explicitly not one of the “pollutants” covered by the bill. In fact, the Washington Post reported that the Clean Air Act advanced technologies that replace tailpipe emissions with “harmless carbon dioxide.”

When Democrats took control of Congress and the White House in 2009, they tried to pass a law to cap emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. One such bill, Waxman Markey, passed the House, but the filibuster-proof Democratic supermajority decided not to pass it through the Senate.

So Democrats opted for the less democratic path of dubious executive action. Obama issued regulations, leaning on the Clean Air Act, that regulate power plants’ emissions of carbob dioxide as though it were a pollutant, even though it is plant food — the world is getting greener — and it’s also what we breath.

Republican-governed states sued to overturn the rule and succeeded in blocking it temporarily in court. Trump’s actions on Tuesday will begin the process of undoing the deceptively euphonious Clean Power Plan.

This action is proper as a matter of constitutional separation of powers. If the federal government is to regulate the emission of carbon dioxide, then Congress should pass a law to regulate the emission of carbon dioxide. But when Democrats had a huge House majority, a filibuster-proof Senate supermajority and a president who pledged to stop the oceans’ rise, they still declined to do so. Even in those extraordinary circumstances, the measure cannot be passed democratically. But Obama, never one to trouble himself over the niceties of democratic propriety when it stands in the way of his agenda, shoved it down the country’s throat anyway.

Maybe Democrats should campaign on such regulations in 2018 and 2020 and see if the voters like the idea of making electricity and everything else manufactured in America more expensive. We suspect they won’t, because they know voters won’t buy it. Most polls show that the public is concerned about climate change but not enough to pay a lot more for energy.

This isn’t an argument against the government taking action to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. The preponderance of scientific evidence makes it clear that human activity contributes to a warming atmosphere, and that industrial activity has brought about our record-high concentrations of carbon dioxide.

The government should examine its own unnecessary greenhouse-gas emissions. Congress root out subsidies that drive such emissions.

But the deep cuts Obama foisted on each state through the Clean Power Plan would hurt the economy family incomes, all based on the most alarmist interpretation of climate data.

There’s broad agreement that burning hydrocarbons, which produces carbon dioxide and methane, which warm the atmosphere, can affect the climate in unpredictable ways. But the dire predictions of where we are headed are built on models, which are chronically inaccurate and predict more warming than we get.

Politics and sensationalized media then taint the process further, taking worst-case scenarios as if they were preordained.

Democrats, environmentalists, and big businesses that profited from the overweening regulations will attack Trump and EPA administrator Scott Pruitt for rolling back Obama’s rules. But undoing the clean power plan should be seen as a victory for the economy, for sound science, and for the rule of law.