Trump's Clean Energy Plan Reinvigorates Federalism

President Donald J. Trump’s announcing his plan to gut and replace the so-called Clean Power Plan (CPP) will be greeted with cheers across America as states reassume control over their own emissions standards. The president and Acting Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler deserve thanks, as well as the dozens of state attorneys general who leveled the first legal challenges to the validity of President Obama’s sweeping measures in federal court. If it were not for our bipartisan efforts, the voices of average citizens would never have been heard. State attorneys general stood tall and won a historic stay at the Supreme Court of the United States to halt the CPP.

But the fight didn’t stop there. Earlier this year, 25 states encouraged the EPA to continue efforts toward rescinding this plan. The Obama administration’s CPP was drafted in the shadow of the Paris Agreement, and designed more to win the praise of Europe’s elite rather than to protect our environment, states’ rights, and the American economy. In a state like Arkansas where over half of the electricity is responsibly generated from coal-fired power plants, the impact would have affected the pocketbooks of Arkansas families. These increased costs would have had a direct impact on the state’s ability to grow good-paying jobs with fair, reasonable electric rates. 

As a seventh-generation Arkansan raised on a cattle farm and married to a row-crop farmer, I can assure Americans that no one cares about clean air and water more than I do. But I do not care for heavy-handed and unlawful regulations from Washington that will hurt Arkansans and all Americans.

We should brace ourselves for the deluge of negative press surrounding the president’s announcement. Those on the outer edges of the left will scream that the reversal of Obama’s climate policy will result in a doomsday environmental scenario. The sky is not falling — figuratively or literally — so let me give you some honest talk. 

Before President Obama’s gross executive overreach with the CPP, the EPA’s authority in this space had been detailed under the 1970 Clean Air Act. The effects of this landmark legislation — a 73 percent reduction in six key pollutants — have been remarkable, but they were still somehow deemed insufficient by the previous administration.