Comment Submitted On EPA Proposal To Revoke Biden-Era Power Plant Regulations

After a few decades in the wilderness, it looks like the skeptics are now suddenly prevailing in the climate wars. I have long said that this would inevitably happen, and that it was only a question of time, because the laws of physics and economics would inevitably prevail. But what I didn’t know was how much time it would take — perhaps a few years, or maybe many decades. It’s much like North Korea. Their non-functioning communist system will inevitably collapse — but when?

Much credit for the sudden reversal in the climate struggles goes to President Trump. But it is also true that the climate scam was always a house of cards, subject to falling as soon as a critical mass of people started testing its foundations.

And I don’t mean to suggest that the climate wars are totally over. Too many people have been making too big a living off the scam, and have far too much invested to give up easily. And so I continue, along with dedicated colleagues, to do my part to help get this beast killed deader than dead.

On Monday this week (August 4), two colleagues and I filed a comment on EPA’s proposal to revoke the Biden-era regulations that sought to force the closure of all fossil-fuel-based power plants. Here is EPA’s June 11 announcement of its intention to revoke the Biden-era regulation. And here is a link to our August 4 comment.

A little background for those new to this battle. Since the inception of electricity delivered from a grid, the majority of the energy has come from combustion of fossil fuels, mostly natural gas and coal. For a recent data point, in 2023, approximately 60% of U.S. electricity came from those two sources.

However, the Obama administration got the idea that they should force all the fossil fuel power plants to close, supposedly to be replaced with fantasy generation from wind and sun. In 2014 the Obama EPA put forth a proposed regulation called the “Clean Power Plan,” intended to force the closure of all the fossil fuel power plants. The mechanism would be via setting limits on allowable “greenhouse gas” emissions from the plants, which limits would gradually decrease until no fossil-fuel-based power plants could comply, by some time in the late 2030s. The CPP became a final regulation in August 2015.

Then the first Trump administration took control, and in 2018 proposed rescinding the CPP in favor of an Obama-lite alternative that would not end electricity from fossil fuels. On the last day of Trump’s first term (January 19, 2021), the D.C. Circuit struck down the Trump alternative to the CPP. That set the stage for an appeal to the Supreme Court, leading to the landmark decision in West Virginia v. EPA in 2022. In that decision, the Supreme Court said that the attempt by EPA in the CPP to transform the nation’s entire electricity generation system went beyond the powers it had been granted by Congress in the Clean Air Act.

The Biden EPA then went back to the drawing board, and on April 25, 2024 came up with an alternative with the pithy title “New Source Performance Standards for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from New, Modified, and Reconstructed Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; Emission Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Existing Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.” This one was a completely delusional effort to impose wildly uneconomic carbon capture regime on fossil fuel generation of electricity. In this post on May 1, 2024, I characterized this latest Biden rule as a “war on the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” This is the rule that the Trump EPA now proposes to revoke.

This time around, per the June 11 EPA announcement, the second Trump administration is not proposing some Biden-lite regulation to attempt to appease the climate gods. It’s just a full-out repeal. Good riddance.

Our comment is some 33 pages long, plus two short appendices, and includes several arguments supporting the position of the current Trump/Zeldin EPA. In this post I want to describe one of our arguments, which is one that EPA has not utilized in its own documentation.

The Obama and Biden EPAs based their case for regulation (and elimination) of fossil fuel based electricity generation on what they called three “lines of evidence,” only one of which was actually “evidence” in the sense of the scientific method. That one is the Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST) record, maintained by agencies within the purview of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the Department of Commerce. (The other two “lines of evidence” were not evidence at all. They were: the various climate models predicting rapidly rising temperatures, and the supposed “basic understanding” of how the climate system works.)

So they only had one “line of evidence” that was actually evidence. And then they introduced into that one collection of evidence large amounts of purported data that they essentially fabricated to support the desired narrative. In particular, for most of the time period of the GAST data, and for approximately 40% of the earth’s surface (the Southern Hemisphere oceans) they had no data at all. So they made it up.

From the Comment, page 8:

[P]rior to the year 2000 the Southern Hemisphere is 80.9% ocean,2 and prior to the year 2000 there was virtually no credible monthly ocean surface temperature data whatsoever for this massive area.3 This fact alone means that until 2000, the surface temperature record had virtually no data whatsoever for over 40% (50%*0.809) of the planet. But the situation is even worse than that because for much of the quoted surface temperature record since about 1850, there are virtuallyno credible monthly surface temperature data outside of North America and Europe.

In other words, an “average” surface temperature has been calculated with 40% of the data missing and filled in by people with a strong interest in creating data to fit their narrative. Nobody really knows what the “average” surface temperature of the world was for most of the time of this data series. We really have no way of knowing that recent temperatures are warmer than temperatures from the earlier years of this record. From our Comment:

Proof that the Global Average Surface Temperature data are fabricated invalidates any claim of record setting temperatures [in recent years].

This argument is easily understood and essentially irrefutable. Trump and EPA would be well-advised to use it in some form in their messaging.

Well, needless to say, lots of environmentalists are also filing comments, and most of them are outraged at the idea that fossil fuels are going to be around for the long term for electricity generation. If you want to review some of their comments, you can go to this link. But do any of them have an answer to the problem that we don’t even know that average temperatures in the most recent year are higher than they were 75 or 100 or 125 years ago? I invite readers to review the comments and see if they can find the answer to that conundrum.