Energy Companies Don’t Like the Clean Power Plan — or President Trump’s Plan to Kill It

Time quotes Myron Ebell about the ability of the Trump Administration to deregulate Power Plants.

Donald Trump boasted last month that the Obama Administration’s plan to regulate power plants will soon be “boom, gone.” Energy companies long assumed that when the dust settled, Trump would then put forward a plan more to their liking.

Instead, the Administration has no plans, and that’s making them nervous.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday that it would repeal the Clean Power Plan, which seeks to lower the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by power plants. But the agency currently has no plan to replace it either, surprising many energy company executives.

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“The Trump Administration can get rid of these regulations,” Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s EPA transition team, told TIME last month. “But if the endangerment finding is out there, the next administration can implement similar regulations without a whole lot of delay.”

Ebell, other far-right conservatives and representatives of the coal industry have called for the EPA to work to eliminate the endangerment finding, but most environmental policy experts agree that such an effort would not stand up to court scrutiny given the overwhelming evidence in support of man-made climate change. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has said that he does not intend to challenge the document.

Read the full article at Time.