As I mentioned last week, I despise how the EPA hurts cities and states across the country by imposing job-killing regulations. The Chamber’s Free Enterprise blog is a great source for keeping up on what’s going on in the states. Blogger Sean Hackbarth’s latest piece is on the EPA going after coal plants in Arizona. Hackbarth writes:
Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne argues that EPA’s regional haze regulations won’t be more effective than the state’s rules, and he’s right. The U.S. Chamber report authored by Competitive Policy Institute policy analyst William Yeatman, “EPA’s New Regulatory Front: Regional Haze and the Takeover of State Programs,” contains a case study of the Navajo Generating Station, another Arizona coal plant in the same situation as the Apache, Cholla and Coronado plants involved in this suit. EPA wants to hammer the Navajo plant with regional haze controls that would cost $700 million. Yet peer-reviewed research has concluded that there’s little chance that any discernible visibility would occur.
As with other regulations imposed by the EPA these new haze regulations have little positive effect on the environment, but huge negative effect on the businesses they affect.
More from Free Enterprise:
In Arizona, it would cost the Apache, Cholla and Coronado coal plants over $1 billion to adhere to EPA’s regional haze rules. That would mean higher electricity costs and possibly higher water costs if the rule is extended to the Navajo Generating Station which powers water delivery in the state. And since other states like Montana, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Wyoming are also covered by these consent decrees, expect EPA to institute rules on those states that target coal-fired power plants.
Closed plants, lost jobs, higher prices. That’s the EPA.
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