Thursday, March 31, 2016

Power Grab: How The EPA’s Clean Power Plan Aims To Nationalize The Electric Grid

by Chuck DeVore

The EPA’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) tells 47 states and three Native American tribal nations to come up with plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions by a third or else the federal government will do it for them. The “or else” looks an awful lot like the cap-and-trade carbon emissions scheme rejected by Congress multiple times in the past decade. In any event, the CPP is an unprecedented federal power grab. 

The U.S. Supreme Court stayed implementation of the 1,500-pages of costly red tape, temporarily delaying electricity cost hikes of around 30 percent, depending on the state. 

The rationale for this disruption of the electric grid is the aim of slowing the rise in the global average temperature by 0.018 degrees Celsius by 2100 — well within the wide margins of error of climate models, none of which have accurately predicted the result of complex interactions of the Earth’s climate. 

Thus, in exchange for a theoretical and imperceptible slowdown in temperature, Americans will lose jobs and pay more for their electricity, food, and water. Nowhere is that more immediately evident than on the Navajo Nation, an area larger than West Virginia in northeast Arizona, southeast Utah and northwest New Mexico that is home to 174,000 people, many of them without work, electricity or running water.


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