The Senate is likely to take up a rare and interesting bit of legislative business sometime Wednesday — a Congressional Review Act resolution put forward by Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe that would, if approved by both the Senate and the House, block the Environmental Protection Agency’s new MACT Rule.
MACT (Maximum Available Control Technology) would, in effect, force coal-burning electric utilities to close down their older plants. With less demand for coal, areas that produce the stuff — including Southwest Virginia — would suffer. So, too, will utility customers, who will likely face higher bills.
The EPA estimates the rule will cost $9.6 billion per year. The EPA also projects net health benefits of $6 million per year.
I interviewed the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell about this on Tuesday, and he called it an “all pain, no gain” scenario. But when I asked him whether anyone could possibly benefit from this rule, he noted that the EPA has identified a very specific group that will reap huge benefits from MACT:
The benefits are aimed at a class of people which [the EPA] define as subsistence fisher-women who are pregnant, who ingest at least 100 pounds of self-caught freshwater fish a year, caught in the most polluted streams in the country. The problem is that their modelling claims that there could be as many as 204,000 such pregnant women at any one time who are living as subsistence fisher-women. They have yet to find a single, live body to come forward and say “I’m one of those people.”
So if you happen to be a pregnant subsistence fisher-woman who scarfs down a hundred pounds of fresh water fish every year caught from a highly polluted stream, the EPA is looking out for you, your unborn child and the fish that sustains you both.
Everyone else can drop dead.
Neither of Virginia’s senatorial nabobs has committed one way or the other on the Inhofe resolution, so they may be open to a bit of gentle persuasion. Mr. Webb can be reached here, Mr. Warner here.
