Texas joins EPA lawsuit
Texas objects to Clean Power Plan as killer of jobs, rate hike for poor.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is joining a coalition of 24 states fighting climate-change regulations.
As promised, Texas is suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over President Barack Obama’s plan to combat climate change, state Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Friday, just after the new regulation had been published in the Federal Register.
The state is suing as part of a coalition of 24 states to request a stay on the plan Friday afternoon.
The regulation, known as the Clean Power Plan, requires states to cut carbon emissions by shifting from coal power to natural gas and renewable energy sources over the next 15 years.
Paxton has warned that the plan would dramatically inflate the cost of electricity for consumers and imperil the state’s power grid, describing the regulation as a federal “power grab.”
“It’s a major threat to anyone who powers up a computer, turns on a light,” the Republican said Friday morning during a call with reporters that was led by West Virginia’s Attorney General Patrick Morrisey.
In its final rule for the power plan, the EPA made changes in response to concerns and ear-
ly challenges from states that oppose the rule, including giving states two extra years to comply.
Those changes led in part to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, recently softening its predictions of doom for the state’s grid and electricity prices, cutting in half its estimate for how much coal-fired generating capacity the state would have to get rid of and lowering its projected percentage increase in electric bills — from 20 percent to 16 percent by 2020.
Paxton said the predictions still are dire and that he is motivated to fight the plan because it will adversely impact poor people.
“Even at that conservative estimate, that has great impact on, especially people that are poor and can’t afford ... higher electricity costs,” he said.
In its challenge, the coalition will argue that the EPA “cannot force the states to regulate where the EPA doesn’t have authority to regulate itself,” Morrisey explained.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, meanwhile, said the power plan “is clearly within the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act.”
“The Clean Power Plan has strong scientific and legal foundations, provides states with broad flexibilities to design and implement plans,” she added in a statement. “We are confident we will again prevail against these challenges and will be able to work with states to successfully implement these first-ever national standards to limit carbon pollution, the largest source of carbon emissions in the United States.”
In a statement Friday, Gov. Greg Abbott — who, as Paxton’s predecessor, sued the EPA dozens of times himself — praised the challenge to the new regulation.
He said “the federal government has yet again proven its readiness to sacrifice American jobs in the name of expanding bureaucratic authority and pushing its liberal agenda.”
The director of the Environment Texas nonprofit, Luke Metzger, meanwhile, described the lawsuit as “unconscionable” given the obvious effects of climate change.