[Lamplighter]

Mitch McConnell's incessant war with Obama moves into the coal fields...

Move to Fight Obama’s Climate Plan Started Early
NY Times - CORAL DAVENPORT and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS 0 AUG. 3, 2015

WASHINGTON — In the early months of 2014, a group of about 30 corporate lawyers,
coal lobbyists and Republican political strategists began meeting regularly in the headquarters
of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, often, according to some of the participants
in a conference room overlooking the White House.

Their task was to start devising a legal strategy for dismantling the climate change regulations
they feared were coming from President Obama.
...
In devising its strategy, the group worked closely with the office of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky,
the majority leader whose coal-producing home state also stands to suffer under the regulation.
While Mr. McConnell opposes the climate change regulations, his advisers knew
that he had little chance of enacting legislation to block them in Congress.
Instead, Mr. McConnell has taken the unusual step of reaching out directly to governors and attorneys general,
urging them to refuse to submit compliance plans for the regulations,
and encouraging a state-by-state rejection of the rules.

But here is a less reactionary Opinion article using ACID-RAIN as the model issue...

Obama’s Flexible Fix to Climate Change
Joe Nocera 8/4/15

[In the mid-1980’s, acid rain was a growing environmental problem…]

The answer was that the administration of the first President George Bush,
working hand in glove with the Environmental Defense Fund, devised a market-based plan,
now known as cap-and-trade, to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions.

Congress passed it in 1990. The brilliance of the scheme is that while it set emissions targets,
it did not tell power companies how to meet those targets, allowing them a great deal of flexibility.
It also provided a financial incentive: Companies that cut their pollution beyond their caps
could trade their leftover emission allowances to companies that were having trouble staying under the limit.

Today, average levels of sulfur dioxide pollution are 76 percent lower than they were in 1990.
The cost has been far less than the critics feared.
…
But just as with the acid rain controversy, the opponents of the new emission-reduction rules have it exactly backward.
The E.P.A. rules have a far greater chance of creating jobs,
being less burdensome and epitomizing sound public policy than the opposite.
...
The single most important fact about the new regulations is that they don’t tell utilities how
to get their emissions down. Instead, they allow the states flexibility to figure out how to lower their own emissions.

Some may choose a cap-and-trade system — as California and nine states in the Northeast
have already done to great effect. (In California, for instance, carbon intensity —
the amount of carbon pollution per million dollars of gross domestic product — is down 23 percent from 2001,
while its G.D.P. has grown.)

They can stress energy efficiency or renewable energy.
They can offer incentives to push innovations that would make carbon capture more affordable,
which would allow for the continued use of coal, still America’s most plentiful energy source.
Or they can do all of the above.

Since many of these things are already happening, the new government policy is really
just giving industry an extra shove in the right direction.
...