Here’s a bit of good news that I haven’t seen covered in the MSM:

The D.C. Circuit U.S. Court  of Appeals invalidated one of the EPA’s  most insidious schemes to shut down affordable power generation. Mrs.  Jackson tried to subject 28 Eastern and Central states to restrictions on  sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, pollutants with the potential to drift from  one state to another.

In practice, the agency was offering coal  companies the choice of either shelling out $72 billion for scrubbing equipment  that provides a barely perceptible improvement in air quality, or going out of  business. Either way, the cost of electricity to consumers would necessarily  skyrocket, putting pink slips in the hands of thousands of coal miners and  power-plant employees.

This is by design, as Mr. Obama explained in a candid 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. “If  somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can,” said the  then-senator from Illinois. “It’s just that it’ll bankrupt them because they’re  going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being  emitted.” While he was referring to cap-and-trade at the time, Mr. Obama was  ultimately unable to get that particular legislative program through Congress.  Now he’s tasked Mrs. Jackson with  eliminating coal through the regulatory process.

The maneuver almost worked, but the court  scolded Mrs. Jackson’s agency for going  too far. “Congress did not authorize EPA  to simply adopt limits on emissions as EPA  deemed reasonable,” Tuesday’s ruling explained. The agency rule “flagrantly” crossed the line and trampled on federalism in an attempt to centralize  air-quality decisions in Washington. The agency’s  arguments for its anti-coal jihad were deemed “extraordinarily unpersuasive” and “unsound.”

Read more: EDITORIAL: Powering up the economy – Washington Times

Of course, we all know what this rogue administration thinks about the courts when they rule against them, but this is a good start.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2012 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Breaking News, Climate, Energy, Environmentalism, Headlines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.