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OFFICIAL STATEMENT 

Lance Brown, Executive Director 

Partnership for Affordable Clean Energy (PACE) 

July 29th, 2014 

Atlanta, Georgia 

Representatives of EPA, I am here today representing more than twenty 

partners across the Southeast. Many of these are involved in 

manufacturing and trade. Others in farming and agribusiness. Still others 

are small businesses making their way in a tough economy. Some are 

simply families who want to keep the lights on at an affordable price. 

The common bond among all of the organizations that are part of our 

coalition is that each will be affected negatively by the new carbon dioxide 

regulation proposed by EPA. The rule will raise the price of electricity. The 

rule will make our nation's energy portfolio less diverse and, by definition, 

diminish the strong foundation of stability we have built. The rule will make 

the price of electricity more volatile by forcing utilities to use more natural 

gas. These are the things the rule will do, and we believe that a careful 

examination of the available data, as opposed to biased hope or belief, will 

lead reasonable thinkers to the same troubling conclusions. 

There are things, however, that the rule will not do. Although EPA has sold 

its regulation of carbon dioxide to the American public as a climate change 

measure, the truth is that the agency's mandate of reducing C02 from the 

power sector by 30% by the year 2030 is about political posturing, not real 

climate results. The agency's chief, Gina McCarthy, even admitted this fact 

in testimony to the House of Representatives in September of 2013. When 

asked if EPA's regulation of carbon dioxide would cause any measurable 

change in the agency's 26 indicators of climate change, Administrator 

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McCarthy said they would not. Rather, she explained, a carbon rule only 

works if other nations adopt the same policies. She rationalized that the 

administration's carbon dioxide regulation "positions the U.S. for 

leadership." In short, this rule is only leverage. 

This is not the message EPA has sent to the American public. If Americans 

truly realized that their government was trading affordable power prices 

and a strong and stable electricity portfolio only for political leverage, they 

would not support this rule. In fact, they would be angry, and disappointed, 

and wondering why the executive branch has made such a terrible 

bargain. 

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has estimated that this rule will raise the 

price of electricity as much as 40% and cost more than 200,000 jobs. Just 

as important, the rule will speed the closure of coal-fired power plants in 

the U.S., forcing another 114 gigawatts of generation off the grid. Philip 

Moeller of FERC puts it in the simplest possible terms: "If you take enough 

supply out of the system, the price is going to increase." 

The agency's MATS rule is already taking sixty gigawatts of generation off 

the grid next year. Mr. Moeller says that these rapid shocks to our energy 

supply could cause brownouts or even blackouts. Meanwhile, the rest of 

the world will use U.S. coal to produce more than six additional tons of 

carbon for every one ton we reduce under this rule. 

The bottom line is that the earth's temperature will not change because of 

this rule, but power bills will. 

On behalf of our partners, we ask the EPA to abandon this irrational 

approach to addressing climate change and focus instead on more 

reasonable measures that deliver real results. 

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