Editorial: EPA out to raise your electricity bill | energy, administration, plants - Opinion - The Orange County Register

Editorial: EPA out to raise your electricity bill | energy, administration, plants - Opinion - The Orange County Register

The Environmental Protection Agency is stepping up its war on coal-fired power plants, imposing first-ever limits on carbon emissions for new electric utility facilities. Ostensibly, this administrative over-reach is to fight pollution and reduce global warming.
Those claims are disingenuous. Carbon dioxide is a trace gas necessary for life, not a pollutant. Its emissions have scant, if any, relationship to global temperatures, which have been flat for a dozen years even as CO2 levels dramatically increased.


What the EPA diktat is certain to accomplish, however, is dramatic increases in electricity prices and the devastation of coal-generated power industry, which provides almost half of U.S. electricity for industry and consumers.

"It is hard to believe that the Obama EPA is announcing a massive energy tax today on American families at a time when they are already reeling from skyrocketing gas prices," said Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who vowed to oppose the rules in Congress.

The administration's decision makes it all but impossible to build new coal-fired power plants. New plants would have to be fitted with carbon-capture technology that doesn't exist. The rules also limit CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions to slightly more than half of what coal plants typically emit now.