A Worthy But Uphill Fight Against the EPA
One more area in which the federal government has gotten too powerful.
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence has written a letter to President Obama telling him Indiana won’t comply with pending federal rules restricting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants unless major revisions are made. Environmentalists say this snubbing of the Environmental Protection Agency is a shameful protection of the profits of Big Coal and dirty fossil fuels.
But here’s the thing. Indiana’s coal-fired electric power plants provide about 85 percent of the state’s net electricity generation. It is folly to pretend a significant amount of that total can be quickly, easily and affordably replaced with alternative, renewable energy sources. Reducing emissions as much as the EPA wants — 20 percent by 2030 — would raise customer rates or reduce the power supply or both.
So we wish the governor well. But he surely understands it will be an uphill fight. The House has voted to give states the ability to opt out of the regulations, but the vote was 247 to 180, not strong enough to override the White House veto that is surely coming. And the EPA, which magnanimously grants states some flexibility in crafting an emissions-reduction plan, is threatening to impose its own plan on states that don’t act.
All of this is aimed at fighting “climate change,” which “a consensus of scientists” say is happening, is caused by human activity and will have devastating effects. But consensus is opinion, not science. The models used to predict climate change (which used to be called global warming until there was an embarrassing years-long pause in actual warming) have not exactly performed well.
The climate has always changed and always will, and the effects, as always, will be both good and bad, and humans will exploit the good and adapt to the bad as we always have. To assume the enlightened few can define what the perfect global climate should be and command it is arrogance on a grand scale.
But that’s the federal government for you. This is just one area among the many we have written about over the years in which power has been sucked from state and local governments and accumulated in frightening amounts in Washington. It is certainly not what the Founders intended, and it is absolutely not the best way to run a country.
That’s what elections are for.
See the article here.
- On June 28, 2015