CHARLESTON — West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey is leading a coalition of 26 states and state agencies pushing to permanently rescind the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan.
The bipartisan coalition filed a public comment letter as part of the EPA's proposed repeal of the plan. It encourages the agency to eliminate the Obama-era rule and return authority to manage energy resources to the states.
“I am pleased to work with President Trump’s EPA in reviewing the devastating effects of this job-killing rule,” Morrisey said. “Permanently abolishing the Power Plan will provide a much anticipated feeling of relief among West Virginia coal miners and their families.”
Morrisey has led the charge on many fronts against the plan. Those actions include challenging the plan the day it was published, leading the states’ legal efforts all the way to the Supreme Court’s stay of the regulation in February 2016 and speaking in support of the repeal during a two-day public hearing at the State Capitol in Charleston last year.
West Virginia submitted the letter with attorneys general from Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming, along with the Louisiana Public Service Commission, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality and the Mississippi Public Service Commission.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt made an announcement Oct. 9 in Hazard, Ky., saying the Trump Administration would abandon the Clean Power Plan which was supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
“The EPA and no federal agency should ever use its authority to say to you we are going to declare war on any sector of our economy,” Pruitt said then. “That rule really was about picking winners and losers.
“The past administration was unapologetic, they were using every bit of power, authority to use the EPA to pick winners and losers on how we pick electricity in this country. That is wrong. … It is right for this administration to say the war is over.”