Republican presidential hopeful Gov. John Kasich of Ohio is going directly to President Obama to stop implementation of the administration’s strict emission rules for power plants, which are the linchpin of the president’s climate change agenda.
Kasich sent a letter to the president at the end of last month. It was disclosed by Ohio officials at a hearing in the House Science, Space and Technology Committee Friday on the Environmental Protection Agency’s emission rules that were finalized Aug. 3, called the Clean Power Plan.
“I am asking you to suspend implementation of the final rule until all legal appeals are resolved,” Kasich wrote. Ohio is part of a group of 15 states that asked the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last month to stay the rule, which it denied Wednesday. The states plan to file a new lawsuit against the Clean Power Plan once it is made final by being published in the Federal Register, which won’t occur for months, according to the EPA and Justice Department.
The court said Wednesday that they weren’t convinced a stay was warranted at this point. Kasich told Obama in the letter that he is concerned the rule faces “significant legal uncertainty,” especially in light of a decision by the Supreme Court earlier this summer on a separate EPA utility regulation. The high court rejected a lower court’s decision on the EPA’s rules for reducing acid gas emissions from power plants based on the high cost of those regulations.
Kasich, who ranks eighth in the Washington Examiner‘s presidential power rankings, suggested the president’s centerpiece rule is also bound for the Supreme Court and will likely be rejected on costs. Critics of the rule says it will increase electricity prices, while driving the need for major infrastructure projects that will cost states billions of dollars. The cost will have little effect on reducing global warming, which is the intended goal of the EPA plan, the critics argue.
The Clean Power Plan places states on the hook to reduce emissions blamed by many scientists for increasing the Earth’s temperature. States have until 2030 to meet state-specific emission goals, equating to an overall 32 percent reduction in national emissions by that year. The final Aug. 3 rule increased the amount of emissions Ohio must reduce.
The head of Ohio’s environmental regulatory agency, Craig Butler, told the Examiner that despite the court’s decision to deny the states’ request to stay the rule, the president can still act to push back the rule.
Butler, who is in charge of the state’s compliance, is considering a formal petition to EPA to ask the agency to re-propose the Clean Power Plan as a proposed rule, given that the number of changes in the final regulation were significant and troubling for his state.
Butler was in Washington to address a hearing of the House science committee’s environmental panel Friday, meant to examine the number of power plants the Clean Power Plan would cause to close.
