Pirate's Cove

Of course, not while he’s in office. Nor anytime soon. The full details of Obama’s energy cost skyrocketing plan will be released by the EPA today

(Wall Street Journal) The Environmental Protection Agency will propose a draft rule on Monday seeking a 30% reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions by 2030 from existing power plants based on emission levels from 2005, according to two people who have been briefed on the rule, setting in motion the main piece of President Barack Obama’s climate-change agenda.

The rule, scheduled to be completed one year from now, will give flexibility to the states, which must implement the rules and submit compliance plans to EPA by June 2016. States can decide how to meet the reductions, including joining or creating new cap-and-trade programs, deploying more renewable energy or ramping up energy-efficiency technologies.

Each state will have different percent reduction standards, and the national average will be 25% by 2020 and 30% by 2030, these people said.

Essentially, this is no more than throwing a bone to the unhinged Warmists, and not much different from the “spreading awareness” campaigns Warmists have engaged in for 25 years. It will do little, and possibly never be initiated. If a Republican wins the White House, he/she can throw the rules out immediately. Lawsuits will surely be filed by the end of this year, and they will continue on easily through 2016. Funny how the rules do not have to be in place prior to Obama leaving the White House, eh?

What we do know is that Democrats in energy producing states are distancing themselves from Obama over these coming rules. The Hockey Schtick notes that these rules will do nothing for climate or public health. Amy Ridenour has ten reasons why Obama shouldn’t impose “climate change” rules, including

• 1. The world isn’t warming. Scientists measuring surface temperatures and atmospheric temperatures using satellites – including scientists who believe in the global warming theory — say the Earth hasn’t warmed since the Clinton Administration.
• 2. Anti-global warming laws hurt people. All the major legislative and regulatory proposals to combat global warming kill jobs and disproportionately hurt lower income people and minorities.
• 4. Global warming climate models don’t work. Since 1979, over 96 percent of models predicted more future warming than took place.3 The models, run backward, also fail to predict past temperatures. Our climate system is extremely complex, and even the world’s most knowledgeable scientists don’t yet understand it.

Many, many states are already looking to blunt the soon to be released rules. You can bet most controlled by Republicans will simply blow them off.

I’ve noted many, many times (as others have), that there has been no statistically significant warming in 17 years and 9 months. This, despite CO2 levels continuing to increase. Something else to note

Pretty much every single poll finds “climate change”, which is, sadly, rolled in under the banner of environment/pollution, to be last to dead last on the list of Things Americans Are Concerned About.

Really, this will be much-ado-over-nothing. It’s simply an in-the-moment distraction from Team Obama, meant to deflect from all the other bad news. That said, it will make a nice attack point for the GOP as we approach the mid-terms.