By Jon Styf
(The Center Square) – West Virginia and Indiana are leading a group of 25 states asking for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to declare the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s new rule on coal, natural gas and oil power plants to be declared unlawful.
The new EPA rule will require coal and natural gas power plants to capture smokestack emissions or shutter.
“The EPA continues to not fully understand the direction from the Supreme Court – unelected bureaucrats continue their pursuit to legislate rather than rely on elected members of Congress for guidance,” West Virginia Attorney General Morrisey said. “This green new deal agenda the Biden administration continues to force onto the people is setting up the plants to fail and therefore shutter, altering the nation’s already stretched grid.”
Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming are part of the lawsuit.
Morrisey and the attorneys general argue Congress did not give EPA the authority to create rules to remake the electricity grid and the rules are taking to make broad regulatory authority away from Congress.
West Virginia successfully fought EPA rules in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 as the court said the EPA should not use its regulatory authority to create broad new regulations with the Clean Air Act.
West Virginia, Indiana and others have continued to fight several other EPA proposals including the “Good Neighbor Plan” and the EPA’s new rule on electric vehicles.
Jon Styf is an award-winning editor and reporter who has worked in Illinois, Texas, Wisconsin, Florida and Michigan in local newsrooms over the past 20 years, working for Shaw Media, Hearst and several other companies.
Originally published by The Center Square. Republished with permission.
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The rule for CO2 CCS is really not very smart–in fact, it is stupid. First the carbon dioxide capture will cut a given plant’s net power output by nearly 1/3 meaning 1) more capacity will be needed which will increase the capital cost the customers must bear and 2) each delivered net KWh will require the burning of 33% more fuel to make the net KWh–costing the customers more.
But the dumbest thing is that sequestering the CO2 will pump it down into a deep well at high pressure. The temperature of any brine in the deep well will mean the CO2 to react with minerals in the brine to for rock. The effect of this is to PERMANENTLY remove the oxygen in the CO2 from the atmosphere and to PERMANENTLY remove the carbon in the CO2 from the carbon cycle of the earth.