EPA's Looming Blackouts

[Geee]

Investors Business Daily:

Energy: It won't matter which light bulbs we use as the administration's implementation of cross-state pollution rules shuts down coal plants across the country. Where will the jobs be when the lights go out?

It's called the Cross-State Pollution Rule, announced last month, and its implementation over the next 18 months will likely result in the loss of a fifth of the nation's electricity-generating capacity.

The result will be likely power shortages, skyrocketing rates and inevitable brownouts and rolling blackouts.

Based on Bush-era EPA proposals that the federal courts threw out in 2008, this latest example of legislation is designed to usurp state powers to regulate their in-state emissions by making it a federal issue on the grounds pollution crosses state lines.

The rule requires coal companies in 27 states to slash emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide by 73% and 54%, respectively, from 2005 levels by 2014. "Just because wind and weather will carry air pollution away from its source at a local power plant doesn't mean that pollution is no longer that plant's responsibility," says Environmental Protection Agency Chief Lisa Jackson.

The targets are states such as Texas that not only resist federal encroachment on their powers but dare to try to balance environmental quality. The EPA claims huge health gains as its justification, but those claims are in doubt. Poverty and joblessness, which this and other EPA rules will create, carry their own health risks.

Two days before Christmas, EPA Regional Administrator Al Armendariz said in a letter that the agency was taking permitting authority over refineries, power plants and cement facilities in Texas from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) starting last Jan. 2.

"The EPA's misguided plan paints a huge target on the backs of Texas agriculture and energy producers by implementing unnecessary, burdensome mandates on our state's energy sector, threatening hundreds of thousands of Texas jobs and imposing increased living costs on Texas families," Katherine Cesinger, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry, said in an e-mailed statement.