After years of decline, coal may finally be on its way out. That is, if President Joe Biden’s new climate rule for power plants survives legal scrutiny. Despite contributing just 16 percent of U.S. electricity last year, coal still wields some political might in Washington, writes Alex Guillén. But the industry is losing two of its most powerful advocates, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. And the Biden administration’s new climate rule released Thursday could make it prohibitively expensive for energy companies to keep burning coal. The rule would also curb pollution from new natural gas turbines. Coal industry supporters are now mobilizing to oppose the Environmental Protection Agency regulation. Republican West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey has vowed to challenge it in court, where he succeeded two years ago in invalidating the Obama administration’s attempt at a big climate rule for the power sector, write Niina H. Farah, Lesley Clark and Pamela King. Unlike former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, Biden’s regulation drills down on carbon emissions at the power plant level, which legal experts say may save it from a similar fate before the Supreme Court. “EPA’s new rule sticks to its plain vanilla, long-standing approach to reduce emissions through systems that help a source operate more cleanly,” said Dena Adler with the New York University School of Law. Under the new regulation, power plants have until 2032 to slash or capture 90 percent of their atmospheric pollution. If they can’t comply, they must exit the grid by 2039. The measure aims to curb 1.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide over the next two decades. That’s the equivalent of taking 328 million gasoline-powered cars off the road. Court battles over the rule are likely to center on whether the Biden administration overstepped the limits the Supreme Court set in deciding West Virginia v. EPA, which overturned Obama’s Clean Power Plan. The court ruled that agencies cannot regulate matters of vast political and economic significance without explicit direction from Congress. (The justices didn’t say how vast the impact would need to be to trigger that requirement.) Morrisey said Biden’s new climate rule violates that standard by striving to use unattainable pollution limits to put coal plants out of business, calling EPA an “out-of-control agency.” But EPA Administrator Michael Regan told reporters that he’s confident the agency’s new regulation will withstand legal scrutiny. “We have spent time ensuring that each path taken is durable,” Regan said.
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