Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) took to the floor of the Senate on Monday to blast the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) decision to place stricter regulations on U.S. coal plants.
“Median income is down in America per family by $2,300. Your wages are down, your job prospects are down, unemployment remains exceedingly high, and we are now going to add in effect another tax, a regulatory tax on the price of energy so a person’s electric bill and their gas bill is going to go up?” an exasperated Sessions asked rhetorically. “That’s the inevitable result of [the newly announced EPA regulations].”
The EPA will finalize its stricter standards in mid-2015. The agency will then give each state a year to design a plan to implement the new regulations. States will have the option to upgrade their existing coal-fired units and promote “renewable energy,” or abandon coal all together. If a state does not produce an implementation plan, the federal government can intervene and impose one on them.
At least one state attorney general has vowed to file suit against the EPA’s regulations.
The Washington Post noted that “environmentalists consider the regulation the most important step President Obama can take to address climate change, and they have put him on notice that they consider this a litmus test for his second term.” Wind and solar energy producers favor the new regulations because they will put greater pressure on energy producers to abandon fossil fuels in favor of carbon-free sources of electricity.
Business groups and the coal industry are adamantly opposed to the new regulations, claiming they will be the realization of President Obama’s 2008 concession that his energy plan would cause energy rates to “necessarily skyrocket.”
A newly released study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce predicts the Obama administration’s environmental mandates will cost the United States more than 220,000 jobs over the next several years.
According to the study, the proposed regulations will have a disproportionate impact on southern states, where energy costs would jump by $6.6 billion per year over the next decade-and-a-half. The “East-South-Central” region of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky would see its GDP shrink by an estimated $2.2 billion and would lose 21,400 jobs as a result of the plan.
On Monday, Sen. Sessions said the new regulations would also disproportionately impact lower income Americans, a group that President Obama frequently claims to champion.
“This is about jobs. It’s about middle income, hardworking Americans,” Sessions said. “Higher energy costs are direct negatives for poor, hardworking Americans.”
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, however, said that the U.S. must do something about global warming before it’s too late.
“For the sake of our families’ health and for our kids future, we have a moral obligation to act on climate,” said McCarthy. “This is not just about disappearing polar bears and ice caps… This is about protecting our health, and it is about protecting our homes.”
Sessions has in recent months been one of the fiercest critics of the Obama Administration’s climate change agenda.
In February, Sessions blistered President Obama’s Science Czar, demanding he stop advancing a political agenda. In March, he said he believes global warming alarmists are spreading “deliberate misinformation.” And in April, Sessions said the president’s EPA Assistant Administrator nominee was flat out denying the facts by claiming global warming is leading to an increased number of extreme weather events.
On Monday, Sessions pointed his criticisms of the Administration’s fudging of the facts directly at the President himself.
“I’ve got to tell you, one of the most frustrating things and one of the most disappointing things to me is that the President in the last several years… has three times said that the temperature is increasing faster than the experts predicted,” Sessions said. “Think about that. The President of the United States, in the face of obvious data to the contrary, is repeatedly saying it’s increasing faster [than the experts predicted]. That worries me. I believe the President of the United States has a responsibility when he advocates for policies to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That is not so!”
Follow Cliff on Twitter @Cliff_Sims
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