The Environmental Protection Agency stacked the deck against states when it created the centerpiece of the president’s climate agenda, the Clean Power Plan, according to a report released Tuesday by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“EPA’s power plant regulations are flawed at their very core,” said Karen Harbert, the president and CEO of the Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy.
The Clean Power Plan requires states to cut their greenhouse gas emissions a third by 2030. Many scientists blame the emissions for causing the Earth’s climate to warm, causing more severe weather. But the goal of the plan was based on data that stacked the deck when it comes to states’ ability to use wind energy to comply.
“Our analysis reveals how the EPA relied on tactics buried deep in the rule’s complex regulatory formulas to make the rule at least 28 percent more stringent, which will increase compliance costs on states, utilities and consumers by billions of dollars,” Harbert said.
Tuesday’s report, titled “What’s in a target?” shows that the rule’s stringency relies heavily on the agency’s use of the year 2012 to base its assumptions in determining how stringent states’ targets should be.
“In 2012, the pending expiration of the production tax credit (PTC) triggered a massive spike in new wind installations,” the report said. “Despite the fact that no government forecast expects the unusual, record-smashing circumstances of 2012 to come close to being repeated, the [Clean Power Plan] assumes that it will in fact reoccur every year for seven straight years.”
The Chamber says that is nothing short of deception.
“Had the EPA based its regulatory requirements on the second-highest wind capacity deployment year instead of 2012, it would make the overall Clean Power Plan emissions reductions 93 million tons — or 22 percent — less stringent,” according to the Institute.
The report comes as the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is poised to rule on litigation to stay the Clean Power Plan. The stay would put the plan on hold as the court reviews the merits of arguments in a broader lawsuit from the Chamber and 27 states to kill the plan entirely.
The court is expected to make a decision on the stay by the end of the month.
