A rising tide lifts all boats — even boats that, contrary to all evidence, openly doubt the moon's gravitational influence.
A new study released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Rhodium Group concludes that the EPA's proposed carbon rules for existing power plants will benefit states like Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma the most — states where climate denial is not just rampant but often a policy officially boosted by high-ranking officials.
In fact, Texas Governor Rick Perry, who once dismissed climate change as a “contrived phony mess that is falling apart,” led a group of Republican governors in blasting the EPA's regulation, which assigns states greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and mandates that they devise a plan for achieving those cuts.
The group sent a letter to President Obama decrying the regulations as bad for the economy. “This is such a dangerous overreach in terms of the potential threat to our economy,” Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said.
But as the New York Times reports:
The study… concluded that the regulation would cut demand for electricity from coal — the nation’s largest source of carbon pollution — but create robust new demand for natural gas, which has just half the carbon footprint of coal. It found that the demand for natural gas would, in turn, drive job creation, corporate revenue and government royalties in states that produce it, which, in addition to Oklahoma and Texas, include Arkansas and Louisiana.
States like Wyoming and Kentucky that have economies still largely dependent on coal production will certainly take a hit. But these are the growing pains of the emerging clean energy economy, and polls show not only that a “lopsided and bipartisan majority of Americans support federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions” but also that Americans are “willing to stomach a higher energy bill to pay for it.”
Image by Sylvie Bouchard