Letter to Barack Obama, President of the United States - Regarding Cap-and-Trade Rule

Letter

Dear President Obama:

We write to express our concerns with your proposed rule for existing power plants emissions of greenhouse gases.

Our primary concern is that the rule as proposed will result in significant electricity rate increases and additional energy costs for consumers. These costs will, as always, fall most heavily on the elderly, the poor, and those on fixed incomes. In addition, these costs will damage families, businesses, and local institutions such as hospitals and schools. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently unveiled a study indicating that a plan of this type would increase America's electricity bills, decrease a family's disposable income, and result in job losses.

This proposed rule continues your Administration's effort to ensure that American families and businesses will pay more for electricity, an important goal emphasized during your initial campaign for President, and suffer reduced reliability as well. Removing coal as a power source from the generation portfolio -- which is a direct and intended consequence of your Administration's rule -- unnecessarily reduces reliability and market flexibility while increasing costs. As you are aware, low-income households spend a greater share of their paychecks on electricity and will bear the brunt of rate increases.

In your haste to drive coal and eventually natural gas from the generation portfolio, your Administration has disregarded whether EPA even has the legal authority under the Clean Air Act to move forward with this proposal, the dubious benefit of prematurely forcing the closure of even more base load power generation from America's electric generating fleet, and the obvious signal this past winter's cold snap sent regarding our continued need for reliable, affordable coal-fired generation.

In fact, your existing source proposal goes beyond the plain reading of the Clean Air Act, and it, like your Climate Action Plan, includes failed elements from the cap-and-trade program rejected by the United States Senate. You need only look back to June 2008 for a repudiation of that type of approach by the United States Senate. On June 2, 2008, the Senate debate began on S. 3036, the Climate Security Act, a cap-and-trade bill, and ended in defeat on June 6, when the Senate refused to invoke cloture. Since that time, Majority Leader Harry Reid has avoided votes that would provide a record of the Senate's ongoing and consistent disapproval of your unilateral action.

Including emissions sources beyond the power plant fence as opposed to just those emissions sources inside the power plant fence creates a cap-and-trade program. As you noted in the wake of the initial failure of cap-and-trade, "There are many ways to skin a cat," and your Administration seems determined to accomplish administratively what they failed to achieve through the legislative process.

At a time when manufacturers are moving production from overseas to the U.S. and investing billions of dollars in the process, we are very concerned that an Administration with a poor management record decided to embark on a plan that will result in energy rationing, pitting power plants against refineries, chemical plants, and paper mills, for the ability to operate when coming up against EPA's emissions requirements. A management decision that eliminates access to abundant, affordable power puts U.S. manufacturing at a competitive disadvantage.

Moreover, there is substantial reason and historical experience to justify our belief that at the end of the rulemaking process, EPA will use its authority to constrain State preferences with respect to program design, potentially going so far as dictating policies that restrict when American families can do the laundry or run the air conditioning. Such impositions practically guarantee that costs, which will of course be passed along to ratepayers, will be maximized, the size and scope of the federal government will expand, and the role of the States in our system of cooperative federalism will continue to diminish.

Finally, we are concerned that there is almost no assessment of costs that will be imposed by this program. Again, if history is any guide, the costs imposed on U.S. businesses and families will be significant and far exceed EPA's own estimate. More disturbingly, the benefits that may result from this unilateral action -- as measured by reductions in global average temperature or reduced sea level rise, or increase in sea ice, or any other measurement related to climate change that you choose -- will be essentially zero. We know this because in 2009, your former EPA Administrator testified that "U.S. action alone would not impact world CO2 levels." If these assumptions are incorrect, please don't hesitate to provide us with the data that proves otherwise.
We strongly urge you to withdraw this rule.

Sincerely,