The regulatory ‘war’ on fossil fuels, explained
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin recently remarked that his agency would “end the … war,” waged by previous administrations, “on so much of our U.S. domestic energy supply.”
Certain commentators, however, object to this characterization. They deny the existence of a regulatory “war” on fossil fuels.
Allow me to explain why these deniers are wrong.
One might say regulatory “war” is the continuation of interest-group politics by other means. Over the last half century, environmental organizations became political powerhouses. I’m not faulting these groups’ success in the political arena. Rather, I’m merely drawing attention to the (obvious) fact that institutional environmentalism is a powerful force in Washington, D.C.
With respect to energy production, these organizations are very engaged, and their positions are aligned. They all despise fossil fuels.
The Sierra Club, for example, has a long-running “Beyond Coal and Gas” campaign to shutter existing power plants. According to the NRDC, “the continued burning of fossil fuels [is] an existential threat to our planet,” so “we must directly challenge the dirty energy companies.” LCV, EDF, CBD … they’re all on the same page when it comes to demonizing coal, oil, and natural gas.
Again, I’m not here to criticize. I don’t begrudge anyone for opposing affordable and reliable energy, even if I think they’re wrongheaded. (I’m of the Alex Epstein school on these matters, FYI). Instead, my point is that these organizations hold considerable political capital, and they spend much of it trying to put coal, oil, and natural gas interests out of business, regardless of the broader societal consequences. Their employees often assume important political positions in progressive administrations; their preferred policies become regulation.
It starts with agenda-setting. EPA is beholden to thousands of deadlines established by law, but which the agency fails to meet. Previously, I assessed EPA’s performance of more than 1,000 deadlines under the Clean Air Act and found that the agency missed 84% of its date-certain duties by an average of more than four years. A big part of this poor performance is due to the agency periodically focusing its limited resources on the overregulation of fossil fuels—to the exclusion of its other responsibilities.
In terms of policymaking, the playbook is to operate in reverse. The regulators start with their desired ends—to get “beyond” fossil fuels—and then work backwards to come up with legal and policy justifications. It should come as no surprise that this ends-first approach leads to rationalization in lieu of sound reasoning.
Consider the 2015 Clean Power Plan. By requiring “generation shifting” away from power plants that run on fossil fuels, the rule would have restructured the entire electricity industry, the backbone of the economy. To support this gargantuan market distortion, you’d think EPA could point to some serious support in the law, amirite? Far from it: The agency relied on a backwater provision of the Clean Air Act that, until then, had been used a few times to regulate a handful of far-flung individual sources in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Supreme Court ultimately rejected the Clean Power Plan. But that didn’t deter the Biden administration, which turned to the same dubious legal authority for its own far-reaching “generation shifting” mandate, aptly known as the “Clean Power Plan 2.0.”
Another front in the “war on domestic energy” is the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule. Upon release, in 2012, the MATS rule was the most expensive regulation ever issued by the EPA, costing $9.6 billion annually. And for what? The “M” in “MATS” stands for “mercury,” and EPA monetized the “benefits” of reducing mercury emissions at about $5 million—or 1/2000th the direct costs.
In 2024, EPA tightened the MATS rule. The 2024 amendments are estimated to cost about $115 million annually, yet the agency could not identify any monetized mercury benefits, even though the rule has “mercury” in its title.
I’ve been discussing only one agency—EPA—but it doesn’t stop there. These bureaucratic attacks are launched from all over the administrative state, wherever agencies possess jurisdiction over fossil fuel businesses. It’s a “whole of government” strategy for targeting politically disfavored industries with mandates that are onerous, unnecessary, and legally tenuous.. This is what regulatory “war” on energy looks like.
The good news is that EPA (among others) ceased hostilities. The agency is rolling back cost-ineffective rules. PLF participated in these deregulatory proceedings through comments, which I’ve posted below.
