The state of Oklahoma on Wednesday filed a fresh lawsuit against the EPA over its plan to curb carbon emissions from power plants, arguing it is bureaucratic overreach and causing irreparable harm.
The federal lawsuit was brought by Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt.
“The EPA does not possess the authority under the Clean Air Act to accomplish what it proposes in the unlawful Clean Power Plan,” Pruitt said in a statement.
“The Clean Power Plan is an unlawful attempt to expand federal bureaucrats’ authority over states’ energy economies in order to shutter coal-fired power plants and eventually other sources of fossil-fuel generated electricity. This would substantially threaten energy affordability and reliability for consumers, industry and energy producers in Oklahoma,” he said.
The move comes just weeks after a US appeal court dismissed another lawsuit against the plan filed by a dozen states and Murray Energy Corp.
“By ‘proposing’ that states will be required to fundamentally restructure the generation, transmission, and regulation of electricity, and do so at a breakneck pace, Defendants have left states no choice but to begin carrying out EPA’s commands at this time, well before any court has an opportunity to review their ‘final’ rule,” Pruitt argued in his complaint.
“The entire point of this unprecedented approach is to evade judicial review by forcing states to take burdensome and expensive actions that will be difficult or impossible to reverse even when Defendants’ assertion of authority is ultimately rejected—as it inevitably will be.”
This strategy is already causing irreparable harm to Oklahoma, the complaint said, although Governor Mary Fallin recently issued an executive order banning state officials from developing a plan for how to comply with the CPP.
The US House of Representatives last week passed a bill that would delay implementation of the CPP until all legal challenges against it are solved, although President Obama has hinted he would veto that bill.
By Stian Reklev – stian@carbon-pulse.com
