Yellowhammer News CEO Cliff Sims interviewed Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley on Tuesday for Yellowhammer’s weekly series, The Exchange. The full interview will air on Sunday, but in a particularly revealing portion of the interview previewed here, Bentley recalls a conversation he had earlier this year with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy.
“I spoke to Gina McCarthy, who is the head of EPA, I had dinner with her in Washington when I was up there in February,” Bentley recalled. “She was trying to explain to me about this 37 percent emissions standard.”
At the time Bentley met with McCarthy, the EPA was considering a sweeping new mandate that would require existing coal-fired power plants to reduce their emissions by 37 percent. When they officially announced the mandate in May, the final number was 30 percent.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates the plan will thwart $50 billion a year in GDP and prevent 220,000 jobs per year from being created. Household disposable income is expected to drop more than $550 billion a year.
“I asked her, I said, ‘Gina, who comes up with these crazy ideas?’” Bentley continued. “That’s what I said. I said, ‘Who comes up with the crazy idea of setting it at 37 percent?’ Well, she stammered around because she couldn’t answer me. I said, ‘You’re killing jobs! Do you not care that we have 16,000 coal miners in Alabama and you’re going to kill their jobs? Do you not care about West Virginia that has a tremendous number of coal jobs. Do you not care about that? Who comes up with these ideas?’”
Sims asked Bentley what the State of Alabama could do to push back against the mandates being placed on states by the EPA.
“I personally believe that if we’re going that if we’re going to push back against the Federal government, the place to push back is in a situation where EPA makes the rules and regulations and it’s not passed by Congress,” Bentley replied. “I think we could push back at that and I do believe that some of these (regulations) are unconstitutional.”
Check back Sunday for the rest of Yellowhammer’s interview with Gov. Bentley in The Exchange.
More of Yellowhammer’s coverage on the EPA:
1. Strange warns of ‘disastrous consequences’ of EPA’s ‘unprecedented, unlawful’ mandates
2. Sessions: EPA’s anti-energy regs deal crushing blow to struggling U.S. workers
3. Birmingham study debunks Obama EPA’s job-killing approach to regulation
4. Sessions: global warming alarmists spreading ‘deliberate misinformation’
