Revolting

This time the term, "power grab" works.  And it isn't pretty.

Let's hope our state officials have guts to say no, and the moral commitment to servw the citizens of Oregon and not an ideology.
Since this issue is non-partisan, and the blog maintains to be issue-oriented, I have X'd out parties and names. You can guess, but the issue's the thing.

The State Electricity Revolt
The Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2015
Review and Outlook - Ray's Journal
Excerpts

A promising way to resist XXXX federal climate coercion 

The Environmental Protection Agency is finishing a rule—expected in June or July—that requires the states to meet carbon-reduction targets by reorganizing their “production, distribution and use of electricity,” as the EPA puts it. This is an unprecedented federal usurpation of what has been a state responsibility since the invention of the modern steam turbine in the 1880s.
  The plan hangs on an obscure section of the 44-year-old Clean Air Act. That law’s section 111(d) was well understood but the EPA has published a new interpretation of these several hundred words that runs 1,200 pages. No less a dean of legal liberalism than Harvard’s Larry Tribe is stunned by this attempt to nationalize U.S. electric generation.

States will be told to meet the targets using four “building blocks.” The first is uncontroversial: improving the efficiency of fossil-fuel power plants and installing pollution-control technology like smokestack scrubbers. But for the first time the EPA is also telling states to roam “outside the fence line” of power plants to force coal and eventually natural gas to shut down, mandate quotas for renewables like wind and solar, and impose energy conservation.

The problem is that the federal government has no legal power outside the fence line. Last year the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals slapped down the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s bid to claim authority over “demand response” on the electric grid.

Thus the EPA is trying to coerce the states into doing what it can’t do itself. Most will need to pass new laws or rush through new rules to comply, jammed into a single year. The EPA wants to embed policy changes that a XXXXX President couldn’t reverse and deny Governors and legislatures the time to think through the consequences. But some states are thinking, and they may tell the agency: No mas.

In particular, states would avoid making themselves complicit in dangerous behavior. Virtually everyone who understands the electric grid, from state utility commissions to the regional transmission operators, warns that the EPA’s ambitions threaten reliability. These apolitical organizations think brownouts or cascading blackouts are possible.

To take one example, the northeast blackout of 2003 cost about $13 billion, and the New York Independent Systems Operator now reports that the EPA’s reductions “cannot be sustained while maintaining reliable electric service to New York City.” It calls the plan “inherently unreasonable” that “no amount of flexibility can fix.” This is not Texas talking.

The section 111(d) rewrite will be litigated for years or decades and almost certainly resolved by the Supreme Court. The 2016 White House budget requests $52 million merely to hire lawyers to defend this single rule. It would be prudent for states to postpone cooperation until the lawsuits shake out, rather than spend billions of dollars now that may turn out to be unnecessary.

*****

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is urging Governors to wait before cooperating, and the irony is that the White House is assailing him for “interfering” with state deliberations. The truth is that the EPA is attempting to steal state sovereignty in order to dominate everything from power plants to ceiling fans. The EPA’s imperiousness is creating the case for noncooperation. States can only protect their energy futures by declining to do the EPA’s dirty work.