Editorial - Obama shouldn't have the last laugh on carbon rules

President Obama on Monday touted the Environmental Protection Agency's extremely strict new rules regulating carbon emissions for electricity generation, the final details of which were announced abruptly over the weekend.

Why are these rules so much more stringent than ones Obama had proposed earlier? The best explanation has nothing to do with science and everything to do with an administration seeking to boost its moral authority on the issue of climate change. There is a United Nations climate summit in Paris coming up this December. Obama does not believe he can bully developing countries into hobbling their economies unless he can claim he is hobbling his own country's economy first.

This is the simplest way of understanding why a president who is about to leave office would publish rules so onerous and so likely to go unfulfilled even under the best conditions. Moreover, accepting the scientific consensus that climate change is real, these rules are based on the scientifically unfounded notion that small but painful incremental reductions in carbon emissions can avert a worldwide environmental cataclysm.

Before Obama had put his first bad idea into effect, market forces were already conspiring to reduce carbon emissions in the field of electrical generation. The newly low price of cleaner-burning natural gas (thanks to improved fracking technologies) is already well on its way to making carbon-intensive, coal-fired power plants obsolete in the United States.

Obama's earlier proposed rule was at least somewhat respectful of this market reality and tried to move along with it. It was designed to encourage power companies to make the switch to natural gas more rapidly. Obama's new final rule, however, goes much further to crowd out natural gas as well. That's because it arbitrarily hikes the share of electrical generation that will eventually have to come from renewable power by 2030, from 22 to 28 percent.

Not that the earlier proposed goal of 22 percent renewable was ever attainable. For perspective: wind, solar, geothermal and biomass combined accounted for 7 percent of electrical generation in 2014, and that was right after a five-year push that included huge new stimulus grants, loans and incentives, as well as an energy bill laden with mandates for renewable use. There is no realistic chance of making that share triple or quadruple in just 15 years — and of course, doing so would only make the price of electricity that much less bearable.

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