by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
A friend of mine tells stories that can be a bit long, so he often gets interrupted, as someone tries to change the subject. It never works. He just jumps back in with, “Well, as I was saying…”
That’s where we are now in the discussion of natural resources, energy, and the environment. Incoming administration officials tend to view the entire Biden presidency as a brief interruption, after which important policies they were working on can resume. They may be tempted to take up right where they left off in 2021, but in at least one major situation at EPA, that would be a mistake. That’s because the last time around, in 2017, incoming EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt (who resigned one year later to avoid being fired amid numerous ethics investigations) made the fateful choice to ignore one of the agency’s most controversial — and most lasting — regulatory actions.
Pruitt focused instead on an egregious overreach of the Obama administration, its “clean power plan,” the thinly veiled program to kill the coal industry. The EPA had been sued by more than half of all the states, dozens of utilities, business groups, legal institutes, think tanks, unions and local governments, maintaining that Congress had never given the agency such power. It was perhaps the most unpopular initiative in the EPA’s 45-year history, and even the then-liberal majority Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of blocking a regulation before it had been reviewed by lower courts. The ruling said the EPA’s unprecedented assertion of authority to transform the economy was causing an irreversible restructuring of the nation’s energy supply, far exceeding any statutory authority. Pruitt repealed it but left intact its underlying justification, the “endangerment finding,” which declared carbon dioxide a dangerous gas.
Additionally, newly inaugurated President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, with its “binding” emission reduction targets and “required” financial burdens, which was never ratified by the Senate. Nor did such federal mandates enjoy public support, which is why President Obama could not get them through Congress even when his party controlled both Houses. He relied instead on executive orders, which Trump later repealed.
