“If the Utility MACT rule is allowed to proceed, it would mandate that virtually no new coal-fired power plants could be built anymore in the United States. It is painful to think about all of these folks who will be out of work.”
Click here to watch Sen. Barrasso’s speech.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), Ranking Member of the Senate Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety, spoke on the floor of the U.S. Senate in support of Senator Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) amendment that would have stopped the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from implementing Utility MACT, the most expensive piece of red tape in history.
Excerpts of his remarks are below:
“Today, I rise in support of the Inhofe Utility MACT amendment. This amendment protects communities and jobs in the west, in the Midwest and in Appalachia, and specifically jobs that depend on coal.
“These communities depend on coal to heat and cool their homes at an affordable price, to power the factories where they work, to generate revenue that creates additional jobs.
“We’re talking about affordable domestic coal that also pays for the mortgages on their homes, the clothes and food for their children and the medical care for their grandparents.
“If the Utility MACT rule is allowed to proceed, it would mandate that virtually no new coal-fired power plants could be built anymore in the United States. Many still in existence would have to shut down. It is painful, painful to think about all of these folks who will be out of work, their bills mounting, their families losing their homes, their future looking bleak.
“Now, the amazing thing is that the EPA does not dispute these outcomes—does not dispute what I’m saying. They know exactly what they are doing. Their ideology is more important to them than the living and breathing people of our coal communities.
“Just ask the EPA Region One Administrator, Curtis Spalding visiting with a group of students in Connecticut when he went on to talk about when he said gas plants are the performing standards which means if you want to build a coal plant, you have a big problem.
“He said, this is a huge decision, he was talking about these regulations that have come out of Lisa Jackson, the head of the EPA. He went on to tell this group of students, you’ve got to remember if you go to West Virginia, Pennsylvania and all those places, you have coal communities who depend on coal.
“He went on to say that we just think those communities should just go away, we can’t do that, but she had to do what the law and policy suggested. He said it was painful—but they did it anyway.
“President Obama’s heavy-handed EPA admits that these communities in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, many other states in the West, Midwest, and Appalachia he said will just go away.
“Chilling words because the EPA is supposed to be about protecting people, protecting their communities, protecting their environment and protecting their health.
“With the Utility MACT rule, the EPA is doing just the opposite. They are making communities go away. They are hurting communities, communities of families, children, seniors as a result of these regulations.
“How can one justify these actions? Well, we are told that there are enormous health benefits. That’s what they say, enormous health benefits, they claim, to the public by the issuance of this rule.
“First of all, how do you protect something if the community is gone? So obviously these folks in West Virginia, Pennsylvania are not the beneficiaries of EPA protection.
“Second, the medical benefits of the rule come from reductions in particulate matter that are currently well within healthy thresholds set by the EPA.
“I will tell you that EPA is cooking the books. Now, this rule does very little to protect the public health. In fact, it creates a health crisis in this country because of the additional unemployment, the unemployment that this rule is going to cause in the West, the Midwest and in Appalachia.
“To highlight the point, on Monday of this week, a number of us in the Senate who are physicians, doctors sent a letter to President Obama.
“In this letter, we expressed our concerns about the impending health crisis that the unemployment caused by the EPA’s policies is having on children, families.
“We hope you will work with Republicans to craft policies that actually achieve both environmental protection and economic growth. That’s the key—and economic growth, not economic destruction.
“We included for the president a copy of a report that I’ve written called ‘Red Tape Making Americans Sick: A New Report on the Health Impacts of High Unemployment.’
“Studies show EPA rules cost Americans their jobs and their health. This report contains the latest research from medical professionals from Johns Hopkins, from Yale, and others that show that unemployment causes serious health impacts.
“Utility MACT will only expose thousands more to these risks. The EPA should immediately stop pushing expensive regulations that put Americans out of work and into their doctors’ office.
“Instead of harming public health, this administration and this EPA needs to work with Republicans—work together in our efforts to implement policies that achieve true health benefits without destroying jobs.”
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