President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday morning unveiled the standards, which force coal and gas power plants to slash their carbon emissions a whopping 90 percent between 2035 and 2040. To meet those strict standards, the agency is advising the plants to use carbon capture technology to store the emissions underground before they hit the atmosphere.
But carbon capture technology is both extremely expensive and largely unproven—at the moment, no power plant in the country uses it, and implementing carbon capture would require the construction of billions of dollars in pipelines to funnel emissions underground. As a result, energy experts and federal lawmakers are arguing that the standards are aimed at regulating fossil fuel plants out of business.
“By mandating the use of technology that doesn’t really exist on fossil fuel power plants, Biden and company are bringing the country to its knees, threatening to force the closure of the majority of reliable baseload and peaking power plants,” Heartland Institute environmental policy expert Sterling Burnett said. West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin concurred with Burnett, saying in a Wednesday statement that the Biden administration “is determined to advance its radical climate agenda and has made it clear that they are hellbent on doing everything in their power to regulate coal and gas-fueled power plants out of existence.”
[Talk is cheap, Sen. Manchin. — Ed]
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