For Immediate Release

Burke, VA, October 10, 2017—The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation yesterday celebrated the success of its petition “Forget ‘Climate Change,’ Energy Empowers the Poor,” signed by thousands of Americans, asking government officials to repeal the Clean Power Plan (CPP).

Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt announced yesterday that the Trump Administration will withdraw the CPP.

“The regulation was ill advised from the start,” said Cornwall Alliance National Spokesman Dr. E. Calvin Beisner. “It was based on belief that carbon dioxide emissions cause dangerously rapid global warming. That was doubtful in 2009, when EPA issued its ‘finding’ that CO2 emissions endanger public health—which is the legal basis for the CPP. Since then, global temperature data have falsified that belief, so EPA has no basis for the endangerment finding and no reason for the CO2 regulation.”

“This is welcome,” said Dr. Anthony Lupo, University of Missouri Professor of Atmospheric Science. “Based on the report that questioned the endangerment finding, the regulations were ill advised.”

Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow Dr. Craig Mitchell, an economist, engineer, and Southern Baptist theologian, said Pruitt’s decision “represents a movement in the right direction. However well intentioned it may have been, the CPP was too costly in terms of both energy production and jobs. The American people will be well served by this decision.”

“Despite claims from environmental groups that ending the CPP is going to have catastrophic effects on climate and air quality, this simply is not true,” said Dr. William Anderson, Professor of Economics at Frostburg State University. “The best path to a clean environment is through increased productivity and an economically better-off society. Mr. Pruitt is overturning regulatory policies that would have made Americans poorer, but with no discernible improvements in public health. It was the right thing to do.”

“Full implementation of the CPP would cost the American economy about $2.5 trillion in lost GDP by 2035 and the average family of four $20,000,” said Dr. Timothy Terrell, Associate Professor of Economics, Wofford College, Spartanburg, SC, and a specialist in environmental regulatory economics. “It would also increase household electricity expenditures by 13 to 20 percent and cause an annual shortfall of nearly 400,000 jobs, especially in manufacturing.”

The only way to meet CO2 emission targets EPA imposed was to shut down coal-fired power plants. That meant forgoing five, ten, twenty years or more of low-cost electricity from those plants and replacing it with higher-cost electricity from wind and solar.

“This and the Administration’s announcement in June withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement are two great steps toward restoring market forces in American electricity generation. That will bring prices down and reliability up,” Lupo said.

“Next, Mr. Pruitt and President Trump need to reverse the CO2 endangerment finding itself,” Beisner added. “As long as it stays on the books, environmental advocacy groups can use it as the basis for lawsuits to force CO2 emission regulation. Take it away, and the whole house of cards collapses.”

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Media contact: Megan Toombs, Director of Communications, Megan@CornwallAlliance.org, 423-500-3009