They’re likely hoping voters’ pain will result in their own political gain.
They’re likely hoping voters’ pain will result in their own political gain.
I n late September, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) repealed onerous Biden-era greenhouse gas standards for existing power plants to comply with the Supreme Court’s recent West Virginia v. EPA and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decisions, which concluded that the agency lacked the legal authority to shut down existing power plants to prevent greenhouse gas emissions. This move will save American ratepayers an estimated $680 billion in what is arguably one of the most significant deregulatory actions in U.S. history. It’s estimated that the average American’s power bill will drop by about 6 percent, according to EPA’s regulatory impact analysis. For a household using around the national average of 1,000 kilowatt-hours a month, that amounts to around $8 every billing cycle, which adds up fast.
But Democrats want those prices to rise, ostensibly in the name of fighting global warming — just in time for the midterms.
Last week, a coalition of 20 Democrat state attorneys general, several governors, and major city officials asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reinstate the Biden regulations, suing the EPA to raise electricity rates in a supposed response to rising temperatures. “The Trump administration is pushing for catastrophic rollbacks of federal limits on greenhouse gas pollution,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the litigation, wrote on X.
“I’m suing to stop this administration from giving the nation’s biggest polluters a free pass to set our country back decades in the fight against climate change.”
Amusingly, James complained about rising energy prices the very next day.
James and other Democrats do not dispute in their lawsuit that the Trump administration’s new rule would lower rates. Instead they argue that the Supreme Court was wrong. They claim the Clean Air Act requires controls anyway while unscientifically claiming the price hikes will be justified by averting unspecified environmental harm.
But even the EPA’s own models admit the amount of global warming avoided would be so small it couldn’t even be detected. “Models continue to show that GHG emissions from power plants have no material impact on global climate change,” states the EPA’s own repeal analysis. The EPA calculated that eliminating all U.S. power plant carbon dioxide would change global mean surface temperature by about 0.014 degrees Celsius by 2050 and 0.035 degrees Celsius by 2100 — undetectably small levels.
In other words, Democratic plaintiffs are asking courts to raise power prices for no measurable benefit. And they are doing this while national Democrats, and many of the same people suing, are running a midterm campaign complaining about high energy prices. Their lawsuit asks the D.C. Circuit to restore a compliance regime whose principal domestic effect is higher electricity rates, in exchange for a global temperature change so minuscule that no statistical test can detect it.
But it gets worse. Remember that a ton of carbon dioxide emitted in an average American state has an identical effect to a ton emitted in China, the world’s biggest polluter, which emits more than all other developed nations combined but tries to downplay those emissions with dubious reporting-methodology changes. Reinstating the standards would not measurably cool any summer or shorten any wildfire season, it would just raise the cost of electricity for Americans and hand other nations a major competitive advantage.
If successful, Democrats would restore the Biden-Harris administration’s de facto slow-acting ban of the majority of America’s electric power, something that terrifies experts on America’s power grid.
“The overwhelming weight of the expert evidence indicates that a 90 percent carbon capture standard applied to generation units fueled by gas or coal is neither technically nor commercially feasible,” Mark Christie, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, wrote in a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “I am not aware of any generating units that are commercially successful in energy or capacity markets today that have met such an unrealistic standard.” The letter goes on to state that the Biden-era EPA “apparently dismissed any serious concerns it heard from FERC staff,” despite the fact that the environmental agency would be effectively gradually banning all natural gas and coal power plants in the U.S.
Electricity demand is rising faster than it has in a generation due to manufacturing reshoring, among other factors, while American families are still adjusting to earlier price spikes. The Trump administration’s answer has been to reduce compliance costs by restricting the red tape that reduces electricity supply.
Democrats’ plan, meanwhile, is to do everything in their power to increase energy prices just before the midterms, likely hoping voters’ pain will result in their own political gain — as Americans blame the Republicans in charge for the higher costs. This is choosing their deep-pocketed environmentalist donors over Americans, which is ironic, given that Democrats are running on “affordability.”
Democratic attorneys general have asked the D.C. Circuit to violate existing Supreme Court precedent to force Americans to pay hundreds of billions of dollars, again for no detectable benefit. If Democrats win, Americans will quite literally pay the bill. Let’s hope the court tosses this expensive litigation.