Bookmark This: Buried Biden-admin Bombshell 2.0
April 22, 2025
Biden Admin, Climate Regs
GAO has uncovered certain facts which the Trump administration absolutely must consider and exploit as it pursues its announced regulatory corrections. This information sheds light on the previous administration’s process for adopting an unlawful “suite of regulations” imposing the “climate” agenda without any statutory authorization. Turns out, that plan was more unlawful than even we knew.
In fact, this information rightly puts an immediate end to the flagship rule, the Biden administration’s ‘Clean Power Plan 2.0’.
If you recall, the Clean Power Plan 1.0, imposed by the Obama-Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), declared that “generation shifting”—forcing disfavored power plants to close via punitive regulation—was a “best available system” for reducing emissions, which had been “adequately demonstrated.” The Supreme Court overturned that rule in the monumental opinion West Virginia v. EPA, holding that EPA had never been given the authority to decide “how Americans get their electricity”, which is a “major question” left to Congress. Along the way, the Court ruled that forcing plants to close via punitive regulation was not a “system” of emissions reductions.
Seemingly taking its cues from the dissent by Justice Elena Kagan, the Biden administration then imposed a second, even more stringent Clean Power Plan 2.0. That plan also sought to force the premature retirement of certain electricity generation capacity, as purportedly the most efficient way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As has been documented, that is unlawful and a basis for overturning the CPP 2.0 rule and others, too.
This second time around, EPA required carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) as the best available system of emission reductions; EPA claimed CCS had been “adequately demonstrated” largely because the former administration claimed that CCS at a facility in Canada was working just fine. This was not true, as any search even of the Canadian popular or trade press would have proved (and the operator’s own quarterly reports affirmed, unambiguously).
https://govoversight.org/bookmark-this-buried-biden-admin-bombshell-2-0/
