By Jeremiah Shelor, August 3, 2015

In a speech unveiling the final version of his plan to reduce carbon emissions from U.S. power plants, President Barack Obama said Monday that the nation must move quickly to combat climate change.

But state officials — as they have since the draft version of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan was revealed last summer — denounced the rule Monday as an overreaching regulation that will harm the coal industry and the West Virginia economy.

Using figures slightly more stringent than the draft version of the rule, Obama said Monday that the Clean Power Plan will reduce carbon emissions from U.S. power plants by 32 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels.
Comments from state officials Monday centered on the expectation that the rule will reduce the use of coal for generating electricity and thus harm the West Virginia coal industry...

U.S. Rep. David McKinley, R-W.Va., questioned whether the projected emissions reductions that would be achieved by the Clean Power Plan justify the potential economic harm. McKinley also criticized the EPA for regulating energy policy without a new law from Congress.

“President Obama and the unelected bureaucrats at the EPA are acting without any input from Congress to ‘fundamentally transform’ our country. The so-called Clean Power Plan will increase energy costs on the people who can least afford it, kill jobs, raise prices for all goods, and make our electric grid less reliable,” McKinley said. “We are a nation of laws, not regulations. The president must stop this executive overreach and start to work with the American people’s elected representatives in Congress.”

For his part, Obama, during his address at the White House on Monday, fired back at the criticism the Clean Power Plan has received from coal-producing states like West Virginia.

“They will claim this plan is a ‘war on coal’ to scare up votes, even as they ignore my plan to actually invest in revitalizing coal country and supporting health care and retirement for coal miners and their families and retraining those workers for better-paying jobs and healthier jobs,” Obama said.

“Communities across America have been losing coal jobs for decades. I want to work with Congress to help them, not to use them as a political football. Partisan press releases aren’t going to help those families.”

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