Democrat Attorney General Josh Stein Pulls NC into Lawsuit Against Trump Administration to Keep Obama Clean Power Plan

RALEIGH – North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein announced that his office was joining 28 other states in suing the Trump Administration over their business-friendly reforms to the Clean Power Plan (CPP0. The CCP is an Obama era attack on the coal industry, and others, to satisfy their environmental and global warming hysteria.

“The Clean Power Plan is essential to addressing the climate change crisis and beneficial for our economy and health,” said Attorney General Josh Stein. “The Trump administration’s replacement rule does nothing to address this crisis or protect us, and it violates the Clean Air Act in the process.The Dirty Power rule is exactly the wrong policy at exactly the wrong time. I’m committed to using my authority to uphold the law and protect our environment.”

The CCP is “essential to addressing the climate change crisis”? The Plan has a goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions 32 percent by 2030, when compared to to 2005 levels. Please, tell us, AG Stein, how much ‘global warming’ would be affected if North Carolina , and other states, actually achieved that goal.

The answer is: zilch.

When the Obama administration instituted the Clean Power Plan, Governor Pat McCrory joined about two dozen other states in a lawsuit to stop it because they recognized the EPA had overstepped its authority. But the our state attorney general at the time, none other than Roy Cooper, refused to pursue the lawsuit on behalf of the State’s governor and legislature. Cooper was a mentor to his successor Stein.

Beyond the EPA’s lack of constitutional authority, McCrory and others in the Old North State had a problem with unevenly the mandate treated us. Reaching a goal of reducing emissions by a third, relative to 2005, is not an equal lift among the states. In fact, North Carolina had already reduced emissions to such a degree by 2005, that knocking them down by another third by 2030 would have been massively disruptive. States that had much higher emissions levels than North Carolina in 2005 would have a relatively easy time.

In 2016, the Supreme Court issued a stay and so the CCP was never put into action. The legal case opposing it was still alive though, and so after Cooper and Stein took office in 2017, Stein pulled the State out of the lawsuit opposing the Big Government emissions reduction plan.

Also elected in 2016, of course, was President Donald Trump, whose administration wrote a new, less draconian, and more economy-friendly plan called the Affordable Clean Energy rule. The name says it all; let the market develop energy with far more reasonable emission reduction mandates. Environmentalists and global warming nuts went berserk, because estimates showed the new rule would only reduce emissions by about half of what the Obama plan hoped to.

Stein’s decision to sue so North Carolina can be subject to more arbitrary environmental regulations is fueled by the Left’s dogmatic loyalty to the man-made global warming narrative. If he and other states are successful, your power bill is going to skyrocket. All so Stein and the Left can feel like they ‘did something’ despite the likelihood that full implementation wouldn’t actually do anything, by global warming fear mongers own admission, to reduce warming. What it will do is put a giant green weight on the backs of North Carolina producers and consumers.

Stein is up for reelection in 2020. So far one Republican has stepped up to challenge him – Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill.