🌎Time To Wake Up: ACE Rule CRA

October 16, 2019 — As prepared for delivery

Sheldon Whitehouse
6 min readOct 17, 2019

Mr./Madam President, this Senate joint resolution expresses disapproval of the Trump administration rescinding the Clean Power Plan and replacing it with its so-called Affordable Clean Energy rule, a name fanciful enough to make George Orwell blush.

The first thing to understand about the so-called Affordable Clean Energy rule, or ACE rule, is that it is a do-nothing rule, exactly as the polluters wish. EPA admits its own rule would do virtually zero to reduce carbon pollution. It requires zero emissions reductions at natural gas-fired power plants; and it would allow coal-fired power plants to make minor efficiency improvements and then run longer hours. That could actually lead to an increase in carbon pollution.

The ACE rule is designed to fool people into thinking that the Trump administration is obeying the Clean Air Act to limit carbon pollution, but no one should be fooled.

From the get-go, the Trump administration made clear it didn’t care about cutting carbon pollution, fighting climate change, or protecting the environment or public health. It cared about obeying the fossil fuel industry, not the law.

Within weeks of taking office, Trump’s swampy cabinet rolled out the red carpet for coal baron Bob Murray, who had an “Action Plan” for the administration. Here is Murray with Energy Secretary Rick Perry. Look who’s accompanying Murray at this meeting: our EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, then Murray’s lobbyist.

It looks like a friendly meeting. Why wouldn’t it be? Murray was a major financial backer of the Trump administration, and this was payback time. Individuals associated with Murray Energy were the largest source of donations to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and Bob Murray himself chipped in a cool $300,000 for Trump’s inaugural festivities. Murray was also one of the largest donors to election spending groups associated with disgraced EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, under whose tenure the ACE rule began.

Murray Action Plan

What was the first item on Bob Murray’s Action Plan? To get rid of the Clean Power Plan.

Bob Murray wasn’t the only one who wanted to scrap the Clean Power Plan. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers — two of the largest and most powerful trade associations in Washington — also asked the EPA to scrap the Clean Power Plan. No surprise: the independent watchdog group InfluenceMap found the Chamber and NAM the two worst obstructers of climate action. They won’t reveal their donors, but I believe they took lots of money from the fossil fuel industry and became its mouthpiece. They got paid, and this was the play.

The Chamber and NAM were aligned with shadowy fossil fuel industry front groups like the Utility Air Regulatory Group or UARG and the American Council for Clean Coal Electricity (what is it with these Orwellian names?). These groups also asked the EPA to scrap the Clean Power Plan and replace it with something as toothless as the ACE rule.

Unsavory enough? It gets worse. Guess who represented UARG? None other than fossil fuel industry stooge Bill Wehrum, who helped operate a web of front groups, like UARG, which obscured and multiplied the influence of Wehrum’s polluter clients — clients responsible for massive quantities of carbon pollution. Naturally, Trump put this guy in as head of EPA’s Air Office, and before Wehrum headed for the exits this summer, “Murray’s Man” Wheeler praised Wehrum for “tremendous progress” in repealing climate regulations. Pruitt to Wheeler to Wehrum — this is rank fossil-fuel crookedness in plain view.

Several of us submitted comments laying out the political, financial, and professional connections between the Trump officials who developed this bogus rule, and the fossil fuel industry that asked for it. Those comments are posted online and in the Federal Register. Also available online is the report I did with Senator Carper detailing Wehrum’s industry ties and conflicts of interest.

Visit my Medium page for links to all of this: https://medium.com/p/825009bfa310/edit,

The crony capture of EPA is not the only problem with this rule. The industry is so greedy, and its hacks are so clumsy, that they didn’t bother to align the rule with the scientific and economic evidence.

In court, agency actions will be found to be arbitrary and capricious — and therefore invalid — if they are not the product of “reasoned decision-making.” In this case, it is clear the EPA ignored the science, ignored the economics, and produced exactly what the fossil fuel industry told it to do: a do-nothing rule that took good care of the coal and natural gas industries.

What does the science tell us? According to the world’s best scientific report, if we reduce carbon pollution by roughly half by around 2030 and reach net zero emissions sometime around the middle of the century, we stand a chance to hold global average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Our own best scientists warn that if we don’t limit carbon pollution, we’ll be hit with economic losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year by the end of the century.

Legions of economists, investment banks, asset managers, central banks, credit ratings agencies, and other experts warn of serious economic risks from climate upheaval. Here’s a summary of just some of those warnings, which I had delivered to every Senate colleague. That can be found on my Medium page, too.

Pruitt, Wehrum, and Wheeler ignored all this for their do-nothing rule. The only voice that mattered was the polluter industry that they came from and will go back to.

The ACE rule is the exact opposite of reasoned decision-making. But that was never the point. The fix was in. Even a bogus rule that courts throw out buys this crooked and corrupting industry time — time to keep polluting, time to burn through its reserves, time to use its political muscle to fend off action here in the Senate. If you’re in the fiddling business, fiddling while Rome burns is a fine economic proposition for you.

The Supreme Court has ruled that greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The EPA has found that greenhouse gases from power plants endanger human health and welfare. Those determinations mean the EPA must limit carbon pollution, consistent with the law. This masquerade of a rule fails to do this, so it must be replaced with something effective, as a matter of law.

Colleagues, think carefully about your vote on this resolution. Do you want to endorse this record of obvious industry capture? Do you want to side with this corrupting industry over your constituents’ health and safety? Do you want to go on record ignoring all the warnings from the Bank of England, from Freddie Mac, from Nobel Prize-winning economists, and from hundreds of our government’s own most knowledgeable experts?

The fossil fuel industry — its voice full of money, as F. Scott Fitzgerald might say — has drowned out the voices too long here of everyone else. But you can’t shout down the laws of physics. You can’t shout down the laws of biology and chemistry and economics. Those laws will have their way, and we have been well warned.

So let’s turn the corner to a brighter day; when decency rules, not industry political thuggery; a brighter day when facts and science matter, not dark money and fake denial; a brighter day when we don’t give our grandchildren daily cause for shame.

It is time to wake up. This vote is a chance to do so.

--

--

Sheldon Whitehouse
Sheldon Whitehouse

Written by Sheldon Whitehouse

U.S. Senator from Rhode Island, the Ocean State.

No responses yet