Ohioans go to W.Va. to support EPA plan
A Pickerington high school senior shared the stage with powerful Ohio coal magnates Tuesday in the only opportunity the public has to formally voice their opinion about the Clean Power Plan.
About 270 people registered to testify at the two-day public hearing that began Tuesday in the heart of coal country in Charleston, West Virginia.
There, everyone from coal miners in full uniform to mothers of asthmatic
children weighed in on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to repeal the Clean Power Plan.
Proponents of the Obamaera rule aimed at reducing carbon emissions from power plants say it’s commonsense public health protection, a solution to climate change and investment in clean energy. The EPA and the coal industry have cast the plan as the epitome of far-reaching, job-killing regulation.
Four slots on Tuesday’s docket were reserved for St. Clairsville-based Murray Energy Corp. which, with its subsidiaries, represents Ohio’s largest coal producer.
“Now is the time to end the catastrophic destruction wrought by the Obama administration’s ‘War on coal,’ including the so-called Clean Power Plan,” said Bob Murray, the company’s chairman, president and CEO.
Also on the agenda was 18-year-old Haley Staudmyer, of Pickerington, who made the three-hour journey to West Virginia with a busload of central Ohio environmentalists.
“I definitely expect to be one of the youngest today,” Staudmyer said. “I’m ready to recognize climate change will be the greatest challenge we’ll have to address in my lifetime.”
Tuesday’s testimonies branched out to subjects from the future of renewable energy to utility bills, asthma rates and extreme weather events.
“I only realized in the last few years how democracy works. It’s not as easy as it seemed in elementary school. This hearing is part of it,” said Jackie Mostow, a 27-year-old Ohio State medical student who focused on the health implications of air pollution in her testimony.
What is the Clean Power Plan?
The 2015 Clean Power Plan is a cornerstone of former President Barack Obama’s climate-change agenda.
It calls for a 32 percent reduction in overall carbon dioxide emissions over 15 years.
It was immediately challenged in court by more than 20 states, including Ohio, and has never gone into effect.
In Ohio, where coal sales have continued to fall annually and miners represent just a fraction of 1 percent of the workforce, adversaries have called the plan a “thinly veiled assault on their livelihood.”
State lawmakers have split along party lines in their reaction to its proposed rollback.
Is there anything unusual about this week’s hearings?
Public comment is a routine, legally required step in official rulemaking.
The Obama administration held four public hearings, in Denver, Washington, Atlanta and Pittsburgh, before finalizing the Clean Power Plan.
This time around, the federal agency scheduled a single public hearing and placed it in politically symbolic coal country.
“There are a lot of people upset about this,” said Tracy Sabetta, a local National Wildlife Federation representative. “People can’t get to West Virginia if they live in Wyoming or Florida. It’s limiting.”
Regardless, the testimony is unlikely to have any effect on the rollback, said James Van Nostrand, director of West Virginia University Law’s Center for Energy and Sustainable Development.
“It’s clear the direction (the EPA) wants to go. Nothing they hear today will change anything,” he said.
Citizens also can submit written comments — already numbering about 3,600 — on the proposal until January 16, 2018.
What’s next?
Several Supreme Court decisions have triggered a legal obligation for the agency to regulate harmful greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
That means the EPA is required to produce a replacement for the Clean Power Plan.
Industry leaders and environmental activists predict it will be years before such a replacement makes its way from draft to the federal registry.
Still, the Clean Power Plan repeal joins a growing list of administrative actions that have environmentalists increasingly worked up over the Trump cabinet’s response to climate change.
In unity with the scientific community at large, a majority of Ohioans believes in climate change, with more than half saying it’s driven mostly by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.
Congress can move to address pollution and climate change by amending existing statutes or introducing new measures such as a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade policy. Van Nostrand said market forces and efforts by local governments also will continue to shape environmental policy moving forward.