TOLEDO — “Before Ohio froze its energy-efficiency mandate, it saved consumers and businesses $1 billion on their electric bills and curbed energy waste. Environmental groups cite other benefits, less quantifiable but no less crucial, from the carbon-pollution rule to Ohio, such as improved public health from reduced air pollution — fewer asthma attacks, heart attacks, and premature deaths. It also means more-reliable energy, expanded local economic development, broader technological innovation, and fewer extreme weather events caused by global warming.
Mr. DeWine says the Clean Power Plan is illegal because it forces states ‘to fundamentally restructure their electric grids’ and imposes ‘double regulation’ of coal-fired power plants under the federal Clean Air Act. But the plan is a logical extension of that law.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled three times that the EPA can regulate greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide under the clean air law. Previous legal challenges to the new power-plant rule have failed.
A poll conducted this month for the Sierra Club by Public Policy Polling concludes that nearly two-thirds of Ohioans support the Clean Power Plan. The state’s congressional delegation might want to contemplate that finding.
The Clean Power Plan promotes rational economic growth, public health, an improved environment, and the use of science to make policy. Many of its opponents make priorities of maintaining polluters’ profits and denying human-made climate-change. At least the battle lines on the issue are unambiguous. ”
— editorial, Toledo Blade
