Bluegrass Beacon: Will EPA rules leave Americans out in the cold this winter?

Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014, 4 a.m. – Imagine what good could have occurred if the United States Senate had followed suit last year after the House of Representatives passed the Regulations from Executive In Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act?

The REINS Act, an idea offered by retired Campbell County Judge-Executive Lloyd Rogers, requires congressional approval for regulations deemed to cost more than $100 million.

No one, of course, knows the real price tag of the Environmental Protection Agency’s mandate forcing Kentucky to reduce carbon emissions by a whopping 18 percent.

Still, it’s reasonable to assume that any regulation designed to “bankrupt” the entire coal industry – as then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008 insisted he intends on doing – could be stopped by the REINS Act.

However, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who regurgitates that coal and oil “makes us sick” and that we’ve “got to stop using fossil fuel,” isn’t about to let such a government-limiting idea gain traction on his watch.

Perhaps of even greater consequence than Reid’s lunacy is that this attempt to bankrupt coal fails to answer important questions about consequences of the EPA’s ongoing bout with coal:

· What’s the agency’s plan to keep energy affordable while it hammers on Kentucky’s plentiful sources of it without proven alternatives for providing the quantity needed to keep our economy going?

Tucked in with this month’s Warren Rural Electric Cooperative Corporation bill was a letter encouraging members to “join together to send our message to the EPA, whose recent actions will raise your electric bill.”

In the 15 years I’ve been getting such bills in Bowling Green, I’ve never received such an urgent message from the generally-benign WRECC.

CEO Scott Ramsey warns: “If the EPA has its way, these regulations will increase the cost of electricity and have serious consequences for our communities.”

Ramsey points to what happened in Germany a few years ago when its leaders “decided to move aggressively to renewable energy, such as wind and solar, with plans to shut down coal-fired power plants.”

Germany also decommissioned nuclear power plants following the earthquake and tsunami-driven meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima facility in 2011.

Such decisions are not made in a vacuum – in Germany or in America.

Ramsey notes “the fundamentals of supply and demand” resulted in Germans paying 36 cents per kilowatt hour, up from the previous 10 cents.

He says that while the cooperative believes in a balanced electric supply, “we should not eliminate any one element in the near future, as it will have negative consequences.”

Too many global-warming extremists think no consequence warrants bringing some balance to the discussion. They need to put their Kool-Aid aside and explain such a hyper-ideological approach to the elderly Kentuckian deciding between heat and medicine this winter, or to the coal miner facing the distinct possibility of standing in the unemployment line at Christmas.

· Even if Americans are willing to pay the higher costs for Obama’s utopian energy policy, will there be enough of a supply to meet this winter’s heating demands?

“Prepare for a Major Power Outage This Winter,” screams a recent Wall Street Daily headline over an article in which writer Tim Maverick warns: “With another polar vortex looming, the public should prepare for potential blackouts caused by the Obama administration’s plans to shut down coal-fired power plants.”

While last winter’s record-breaking low temperatures “put a never-before-seen strain on the energy grid,” disastrous blackouts did not occur “thanks to back-up power supplied by less-frequently used coal-burning plants,” Maverick writes.

In fact, nearly 90 percent of the coal electricity capacity due to go offline because of Obama’s regulations was used to meet last winter’s back-up demands.

Where will that supply of resources come from during this winter’s “Polar Vortex: The Sequel?”

Jim Waters is president of the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank. Reach him at jwaters@freedomkentucky.com. Read previously published columns at www.bipps.org.

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