The Obama administration is moving forward with a new environmental rule requiring power plants to drastically reduce carbon emissions, a policy President Obama says will improve our health and our bottom line but critics say is a massive tax hike that won’t do the planet a bit of good.
Earlier this week, President Obama unveiled a new directive from the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, that mandates a 32 percent reduction in carbon emission by 2030.
“As one of America’s governors has said, “We’re the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it,'” said Obama. “And that’s why I committed the United States to leading the world on this challenge, because I believe there is such a thing as being too late.”
Obama also tried to head off critics concerned about the impact of this rule on energy prices by saying his administration’s studies conclude the average American will save $85 per year on energy costs once this is fully implemented.
Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman James Inhofe, R-Okla., says this rule is just a bureaucratic reincarnation of failed legislative efforts on cap and trade through bills like McCain-Lieberman and Waxman-Markey. Inhofe says once Americans found out what was in those bills they wanted nothing to do with them. He believes the reaction will be the same to this EPA rule.
“When the people found out how expensive they are, and the cost is between $300-$400 billion, that translates to about $3,000 for every taxpaying family in America. And then they find out that even if all these things were passed, it’s not going to have the effect of reducing [carbon dioxide] worldwide,” said Inhofe, who is also author of “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.”
The senator says the testimony of two other key players backs up his point, including then-Sen. Barack Obama during a discussion with the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle during the 2008 campaign.
“Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket,” said Obama in that interview. “Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal plants, natural gas, you name it. Whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.”
Inhofe also says former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told him in a committee hearing that new emissions mandates on power plants and others wouldn’t actually make a difference in our climate.
“I asked her the question, ‘If we do all this stuff unilaterally in America, will it reduce CO2?” She said no. As a matter of fact it could increase CO2 because as we chase our manufacturing base overseas to China and other places where they have no restrictions, it would have the effect of increasing CO2,” said Inhofe.
Obama also tried to blunt conservative protests that new restrictions would hurt minority and poor communities the hardest.
“Even more cynical, we’ve got critics of this plan who are actually claiming that this will harm minority and low-income communities — even though climate change hurts those Americans the most, who are the most vulnerable,” said Obama this week.
“Today, an African-American child is more than twice as likely to be hospitalized from asthma; a Latino child is 40 percent more likely to die from asthma. So if you care about low-income, minority communities, start protecting the air that they breathe, and stop trying to rob them of their health care,” he added.
Inhofe says the chairman of the Black Chamber of Commerce told his committee a far different story.
“It’d be the most regressive of all taxes that we’ve ever passed, going after the poorest people. Think about it. The lower your income is, the higher percentage you’re going to be spending on heating your home,” said Inhofe.
The senator believes the administration is simply toeing the line with the United Nations insistence that climate change is an immediate, pressing concern.
“It all comes from the United Nations. Unfortunately, I think right now everyone is aware after having watched John Kerry as secretary of state trying to negotiate with the terrorists. It’s, again, a dismal failure. He’s one and there’s a lot of liberals like him who think there’s never been a [bad] idea that has come from a multinational organization, primarily the United Nations,” said Inhofe.
While the UN and America’s own government are insisting on much more stringent emissions in the United States, Inhofe says the world’s worst violators are just waiting to gobble up our companies and jobs.
“Right now, China is looking at us, just hoping that we’ll pass something here because that would chase our manufacturing base over there. That’s exactly what they would want,” said Inhofe.
Beyond the economic impact is the simple fact technology does not exist to bring many power plants into compliance with the rule. Obama says we need to have faith in American ingenuity, just as we did in drastically raising fuel efficiency standards in the auto industry. Inhofe says the country simply can’t operate on the energy Obama wants to use.
“You can’t make that kind of reductions when you stop and realize that all the renewables put together right now only constitute five percent of the total energy it takes to run America,” he said.
But Inhofe is not without hope. In the near term, Senate Republicans are pushing back with the ARENA Act, a plan sponsored by Senator Shelley Moore Capito of coal-rich West Virginia.
“What it does is pretty much negate everything that [Obama] is trying to do,” said Inhofe. “It would rescind the rules. It would require emission limits that coal plants can actually achieve, in other words they are possible. It would allow states to opt out of any plan that is found to have a negative impact on their economy on their growth or on their energy reliability.”
Knowing full well that Obama will have his veto pen ready for any such legislation, Inhofe says an aggressive education campaign is needed to rally public support against this policy, just as it rallied against the earlier legislative efforts.
“Once their constituency learns that, number one, it’s not possible to do what they want and, number two, even if we did this would not have any effect on the overall emissions of CO2, then people are not going to be wanting to spend a tax of approximately $3,000 a family for something that doesn’t accomplish anything,” said Inhofe.
