Clean Power Plan

The only way to make progress in the problem is really through executive actions.

So things like Obama had his clean power plan.

and things like that.

That is really the only way I think at least right now we're gonna be able to make progress on this because I'm sure everybody out there understands that fossil fuel interests are incredibly powerful and they spent decades paying off politicians so that the politicians no longer legislate on behalf of us, the citizens.

But it was actually, oddly enough, almost a brainchild of even Republican EPA administrators who once actually cared about the environment, who once actually believed in doing what they were tasked to do.

And so this is the primary and was the primary really lever arm that the federal government has for regulating carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, for implementing fuel efficiency standards on automobiles.

And so it was really the primary lever arm for regulating carbon emissions by the federal government, and indeed, it is what allowed Barack Obama to make enough progress through the Clean Power Plan and other policies that they implemented, tighter restrictions on fuel emissions from automobiles, It was really through those executive actions, because remember, Obama was unable to pass climate legislation through the Congress, which was controlled by Republicans, or at least was filibusterable by Republicans.

And so instead, he elected to act on climate through executive.

Thank you for watching.

And they've fought for the Clean Power Plan and they've fought for more EPA regulation and they've fought in the Supreme Court before and they've just lost everywhere.

You know, the treaties didn't go anywhere or they got repudiated.

The Clean Power Plan didn't pass.

The power of the EPA to regulate has been narrowed by the Supreme Court.

And they've just sort of seen themselves losing over and over and over again on this issue they obviously care a lot about.

You know, they have tried in the Waxman-Markey bill.

They maybe were going to take another stab at the Clean Power Plan with Obama, which is going to be a regulatory effort.

Well, that happened and then it got repealed.

No, it got thrown out in the courts.

In 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, imposed standards on mur- mercury emissions from coal-fired power stations known as the MATS, M-A-T-S, rule that entitled-- that entailed billions of dollars in costs for trivial environmental benefits.

The Supreme Court struck down the rule in 2015, but not before the EPA had proposed the Clean Power Plan, which aimed to achieve a nearly one-third reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from power generation.

In 2016, the court stayed the plan's implementation, and in 2022 it decided that the regulation exceeded EPA's statutory authority.

With the Supreme Court closing off the Clean Air Act as a substitute for congressional passage of climate change legislation, the Biden administration found a more insidious way of doing climate policy.

My thesis is that the Supreme Court Citizens United decision de facto killed climate legislation.

And then they went after the Clean Power Plan and blew it up.

And that de facto killed climate regulation.

And with those two avenues of governance gone, what's left is climate litigation.

Um, 19 and 20, imposing new costs on power generation.

Biden and Democrats attempted to resurrect an aggressive version of the Clean Power Plan, uh, for power sector mandates called the Clean Electricity Standard.

In the fall of '21, uni-- uh, fall 2021 unified agenda, the EPA stated their intention to propose what could be considered the Clean Power Plan 2.0. That policy imposed burdensome regulations, uh, that left little or no environmental benefit, but they did it for show, right? The EPA also mandated that even facilities with reduced emissions must remain on the list of, quote-unquote, major sources subjecting these facilities to permitting burdens and higher costs.

So it became even people that were complying, companies that were complying, it became harder and harder to get permits to continue to do what they did.

Impeding Americans' exports.

Nobody's dying here.

But a reverberable harm to the bottom lines of businesses if they don't immediately, through the emergency docket, through what we now call the shadow docket, stop the Obama clean power plan in its tracks in 2016.

The birth of the current shadow docket all starts now.

with the Clean Power Plan and John Roberts' policy, political objection to it, not his legal objection to it.

AR-15s.

So there, there, there are more decisions coming down the pipe, but the big decision this week, n- not decision, but the big case this week, the opening case, is about the fact that the Roberts Court, which invented immunity from criminal prosecution for Donald Trump's official acts and invented a major questions doctrine to block the EPA from the Clean Power Plan, the Obama Clean Power Plan to have utilities produce more energy from solar and wind, um, this court is on the precipice of inventing a new interpretation of the law to protect oil companies from these types of state suits.

So we'll see what happens.

Maybe they won't.

Uh, maybe with Alito not there, they won't have the votes.

But, um, earlier this year, just a few months ago, The New York Times published a, an investigation about the memos around the Clean Power Plan, which revealed the origins of this shadow docket in 2016, and the origin story was that John Roberts was so concerned about the cost impact on the oil and gas industry that he wanted to intervene in that case using this shadow docket to do so based on a claim of concerns for, um, the energy companies spending money that he didn't think they should have to spend.

So that's worrisome indeed.

Wow.