Clean power plant halt yields victory

To The Editor:

Indiana experienced one of its first major victories under the Trump administration recently. While some will lament the action taken to halt the Clean Power Plan (CPP), there are thousands of Hoosiers who praise the order. And Vice President Mike Pence deserve some of the credit to boot.

The CPP was not intended to do great things for the environment or global emissions. That was a ruse to manipulate an uninformed public. The CPP was a back-door regulatory maneuver to get cap-and-trade in place. It’s important to recall that cap-and-trade was shot down in Congress, and per media reports even Democrats counseled Obama to let the issue die as their constituents were not in favor of the legislation.

But Trump fought fire with fire. As Obama went around Congress and leveraged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop the regulation, President Trump took a similar path -- using an executive order to halt the damage this regulation would do to the U.S. economy.

While EPA marketed the CPP as a regulation that would save the world from carbon-dioxide “pollution,” of which there is no such thing, the costly regulation would have -- at best -- reduced sea levels to the thickness of three sheets of paper, and global temperatures to less than .02 degrees Fahrenheit. Even green extremists lamented after the Paris Accord that the regulation did almost nothing for global warming.

But the cost to the U.S. and Indiana economy was estimated to be significant. Enter then-Gov. Mike Pence,who made the bold statement in June 2015 that if the final CPP regulations turned out to be as detrimental as the proposed regulations, Indiana would defy the federal government and forgo submitting a required plan to implement the CPP.

Had Indiana submitted that plan, utilities would have had a roadmap to begin moving forward with converting all coal-fired electric plants to less reliable, cost-volatile and out-of-state fuel sources. And those costs would have been passed on to the consumer -- not realizing the regulation would have been halted in the new presidential election cycle.

So, Hoosiers owe a debt of gratitude to Pence and Trump. We all want quality air and clean water -- but the CPP wasn’t going to get us there. Now we can refocus for the future, one where innovation can drive cleaner-coal technology, and we can dismiss with the costly and politically motivated regulations that do nothing to help our nation.

Jack D. Billman

Greencastle