Gov. Peter Shumlin issued the following statement after the Supreme Court put on hold the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan while litigation against the plan proceeds.
Advertisement
The Clean Power Plan is created to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. That was the month states were required to either submit a plan to comply with the rules or declare their intention to follow a federal blanket plan.
Any decision will likely be appealed to the Supreme Court, meaning resolution of the legal fight is not likely to happen until after Obama leaves office.
The president’s remarks referred to the 2007 Mass. v. EPA case in which the court said that carbon dioxide should be considered a pollutant under the Clean Air Act and therefore subject to regulation by EPA.
The reason for this defiance by a number of states is that their economic growth depends a lot on this fossil and coal fuel industry.
“We are thrilled that the Supreme Court realized the rule’s immediate impact and froze its implementation, protecting workers and saving countless dollars as our fight against its legality continues”, Morrisey said. It is the main tool for the United States to meet the emissions reduction target it pledged at UN climate talks in Paris in December. The CPP’s potential to strand these investments and impose higher costs on Kentucky’s ratepayers was a factor behind the state’s legal challenge of the rule.
In his first comments on the court’s move, Obama told people at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Atherton, Calif., that it was important to remember that the court had not struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, but had frozen its implementation until a lawsuit over the plan works its way through the court system. The stay freezes the plan until all legal challenges are resolved.
“If you’re a utility, and you’re having to make capital investment decisions stretching on a time-frame of a decade or more, you take a gamble if you’re deciding to stay your hand and wait for the Supreme Court to sort it out and hope for a reversal and hope that the timelines for compliance will be stretched out and hope that it won’t affect your ability to make investment decisions in the meantime”, Hester says.
Advertisement
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan would have denied the request for delay.
