Another Failing Grade for Obama’s Climate Agenda  

As we previously noted, President Obama’s former law professor and campaign donor Laurence Tribe submitted a public comment slamming the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) climate rule as an unconstitutional “executive overreach.” Now Professor Tribe has penned an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal that really drives home the point.

Tribe, who once called Obama “the best student I ever had,” writes:

Even more fundamentally, the EPA, like every administrative agency, is constitutionally forbidden to exercise powers Congress never delegated to it in the first place. The brute fact is that the Obama administration failed to get climate legislation through Congress. Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative authority anyway to re-engineer the nation’s electric generating system and power grid. It does not.

Professor Tribe has no ax to grind against Obama or the EPA. In fact, Tribe points out that he has “supported countless environmental causes” and that “coping with climate change is a vital end.” And though his comment was co-authored by Peabody Energy, a major coal producer that is rightfully concerned about EPA’s power plant rule, Tribe stresses that his comments “reflect my professional conclusions as an independent legal scholar.”

EPA’s rule is not only legally dubious, but it does nothing to “address the risks of climate change”, which EPA claims is the purpose of the rule. Using the UN’s own climate models, the rule would reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by just 1.5 percent by 2050, according to the Cato Institute.

Indeed, as Tribe explains, EPA’s “lawless” proposal is more about forcing Americans to use more expensive and less reliable green energy sources than about solving climate change. Contradicting the stated goals of the proposed rule, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy testified before Congress that the plan “is not about pollution control” but “an investment strategy” to hock renewables like wind and solar.

Even if you support EPA’s climate agenda, you should question the agency’s overreach. As Tribe puts it, Japanese internment after Pearl Harbor may have seemed necessary at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight it “looks more like an overreaction.” President Obama would do well to heed his professor’s lesson.