This is simply the first step, politely asking prior to going to court for a restraining order
(AP) The campaign to stop President Barack Obama’s sweeping emissions limits on power plants began taking shape Wednesday, as 16 states asked the government to put the rules on hold while a Senate panel moved to block them.
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who is leading the charge against the rules, banded together with 15 other state attorneys general in a letter to Environmental Protection Agency head Gina McCarthy requesting that the agency temporarily suspend the rules while they challenge their legality in court. The letter called for the EPA to respond by Friday.
The EPA and the White House both said they believe the limits are legal and have no plans to put them on hold. But by submitting the formal request anyway, the attorneys general are laying the groundwork to ask the courts to suspend the emissions limits instead.
“These regulations, if allowed to proceed, will do serious harm to West Virginia and the U.S. economy,” Morrisey said. “That is why we are taking quick action to bring this process to a halt.”
One thing the EPA and Obama administration will have to prove is that they took economic conditions and costs into account, having just lost a case at the Supreme Court in a similar fashion. The EPA will have to prove that the plan is not destructive to the American economy, as well as to low and middle class Americans, and they will not be able to do so.
(American Thinker) According to the American Legislative Exchange Council, President Obama’s “Clean Energy Plan” would  take 33% of productive electrical capacity off the grid by 2020.  And the Washington Free Beacon notes that another report shows that the plan would close 48% of all coal-fired plants in the country.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, this plan is “regulation without representation.” The president’s rules would usurp the traditional role of states in managing their own electrical generation and saddle the economy with enormous costs while empowering the EPA to control vast swaths of the American economy.
There’s no possible way to replace that lost electricity with solar and wind, even if they were competitive with coal costs. Provided that construction wasn’t blocked by hardcore environmentalists. Hydrothermal and nuclear will be blocked, as will natural gas. Hence, energy costs will rise. Period. Which means the cost of virtually everything else will rise. Anyone who doesn’t see this is completely deluded.
Meanwhile, the same people who support Obama’s plan refuse to give up their own big carbon footprints.
