Wall Street Journal Opinion

States and businesses are suing to stop the Obama Administration’s anticarbon Clean Power Plan, and now they have new evidence to seek a preliminary injunction.

The Energy & Environment Legal Institute has obtained government emails that show the EPA secretly worked with environmental lobbyists to craft its Clean Power Plan regulating greenhouse gases. The emails show this secret alliance designed a standard that would be impossible or economically ruinous for existing coal plants to meet—in order to force their closure…

Credit for exposing these emails goes to Chris Horner, an attorney for the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, who has doggedly pursued FOIA requests. That job has taken longer than it should have because Mr. Goo withheld his private Yahoo emails from the EPA for years, despite the law’s clear intent that official communications be subject to FOIA.

Mr. Horner has submitted some of this correspondence to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is overseeing a consolidated case challenging the regulation, and it adds to the evidence that should cause the court to put a stay on so costly a rule.

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