ACE Rule

DC Circuit Gets Help from Grid Experts in Vacating ACE Power Plant Rule

The importance of understanding how things work

I’ve seen lots of good analysis already (including this post from Dan) of the DC Circuit’s decision today to invalidate the Trump Administration’s ACE Rule, which governs climate emissions from coal-fired power plants and does essentially nothing to reduce those emissions.  It turns out that doing essentially nothing is not enough. There’s a lot to …

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Resuscitating Obama’s Environmental Legacy

Trump has had a single-minded focus on eliminating any traces of Obama’s presidency. But it’s not too late to turn the tide.

We’ve now had nearly four years of Trump’s all-out war on environmental protection. Trump has single-mindedly tried  to wipe out every trace of Obama’s legacy.  It’s time to see what’s left of Obama’s achievements. And what could a new President do to revive his legacy? In a Legal Planet post a week before the last …

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Grid Experts Weigh In on the Clean Power Plan Repeal and ACE Rule

UCLA Emmett faculty share expert voices in an amicus brief filed last week in the D.C. Circuit

Among the many Trump Administration rollbacks of climate regulation, a big one is its decision to repeal the Clean Power Plan and to replace it with a rule that does almost nothing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel-fired power plants. The electricity sector has made significant progress in reducing climate pollution recent years, but …

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Trump’s EPA May Cause as Many U.S. Deaths as the Coronavirus

The effects are more gradual, but deregulation could be as deadly as the pandemic.

The Trump Administration has been busy repealing pollution laws that protect public health.  The health impact of these rollbacks isn’t as dramatic as an epidemic.  There’s a credible argument, however, that it will be just as deadly. In order to put some numbers on the effects of deregulation, we need to make some assumptions on …

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ACE or Joker? Trump’s Self-Defeating Climate Rule

The ACE rule adds costs, achieves little, and disempowers the states. Nice job.

The Trump ACE rule violates all the Administration’s own deregulatory principles.To hear Trump talk, the point of deregulation is to reduce the burden of regulation on industry.  But weirdly enough, that doesn’t turn out to be true of Trump’s effort to repeal Obama’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) and replace it with his own Affordable Clean …

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Guest Blogger Nick Bryner: Cooking the Books While Cooking the Planet: A First Look at the EPA’s ACE Rule

Final Rule Changes Baseline Assumptions & Approach to Cost-Benefit Analysis in Attempt to Justify Weak Standards

Yesterday, the Trump EPA released its long-awaited response to the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. At first glance, the final rule has been carefully crafted in an attempt to avoid several glaring legal vulnerabilities of the rule—and to obscure the obvious inadequacy of the Administration’s response to climate change. The EPA has found many contradictory ways …

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EPA’s Return to Bush-Era Clean Air Act Reforms Sacrifices Agency’s Duty to Protect Environment, Ignores the Law

Quiet changes buried behind the big de-regulatory headlines spell disaster for the environment

As I explained back in August, the Trump Administration’s proposed Clean Power Plan replacement (the “Affordable Clean Energy” or ACE rule) came with a significant change to how the EPA has traditionally interpreted the Clean Air Act’s New Source Review (NSR) provisions mandating pre-construction environmental review and the installation of air pollution controls to offset …

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EPA Makes a Pit Stop at the “Chevron” Station

EPA’s latest proposed rollback relies heavily on the Chevron Doctrine.

The ACE rule, The Trump Administration’s proposed rule for carbon emissions in the carbon sector, purports to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants. Its real goal seems to be minimizing the burden on coal-fired plants. Legal Planet has already carried some excellent posts about the proposal’s policy flaws.  I’d like instead to talk about its …

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