If you care about accountable government, policy transparency, and lower energy bills you should welcome President Trump’s decision to kill the Clean Power Plan, or CPP. And while environmental concerns are very important — we must protect our air, animals, and water — the CPP was the wrong vehicle for that agenda.
But why specifically was the CPP so bad?
Well, first off, it made energy bills a lot higher for a lot more families. In 2017, the price-per-kilowatt-hour in CPP-supporting California was twice that of its next-door neighbor, Nevada! The moral importance of this concern cannot be overstated. Lower-income families dedicate a higher portion of their budget to electricity. And if families are forced to pay more in energy bills, they obviously cannot use the lost money on other things. This belies the Natural Resources Defense Council’s assertion that the CPP would actually “save the average American family $85 on its electricity bills in 2030.” The CPP’s champions were wealthy liberals like Tom Steyer and its victims were the poorest Americans.
Yet the CPP was also a gross overreach of executive power. Without Congressional assent of law, former President Barack Obama simply told the Environmental Protection Agency to tell the 50 states to do his bidding. That Obama, a constitutional law professor, saw himself vested with power to order such a vast government mandate remains disturbing. Regardless, it is only one facet of the EPA’s increasing activism in the absence of democratic constraint. Appeals before the Supreme Court will hopefully pare back this pernicious trend in the years ahead.
Finally, the CPP was just bad policy. Requiring states to act without regard to those states’ diversity of energy sources and industries, the CPP hurt communities. The contrast between suffering coal towns and the Obama administration’s penchant for throwing vast sums of money to subsidize the green energy industry was an unpleasasnt one (although it would also be wrong to subsidize the coal industry).
Don’t get me wrong, I believe that corporations and others who abuse the environment deserve tougher penalties. I also believe in environmental policies to protect our planet. Nevertheless, the CPP was undemocratic, expensive, and damaging for too many Americans. It deserved to be killed.
