Environmental groups are suing the Biden administration over TVA’s replacement of a coal-fired power plant

The Tennessee Valley Authority couldn’t be done today. When it was finished, it transformed an area mired in poverty. With affordable electricity they had water. They could farm with water. Agriculture made food affordable.

Within a generation the area changed and soon gained libraries, schools and a much better quality of life.

Environmentalists are needed, it’s how they feed their $3 billion a year hunger, and that’s why TVA could never happen today. Environmental advocates are so obstructionist and culturally corrosive, TVA cannot even replace a coal-fired power plant without a lawsuit.

A coal-fired power station. When activists claim they are concerned about climate change.

Wheeler Dam under construction in 1933. For no scientific reason, environmentalists now think dams are bad, and in 1933 the lucky ones agreed. Those who controlled the river didn’t want TVA at all, it was worse for them. Newspapers reported their plight, just as they did for the lucky few Baathists in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was deposed. As we see the coastal elites, progressivism is for others; if it hits them, it goes into someone else’s backyard. Credit and link: TVA

The reason environmentalists object is because TVA wants to replace coal with natural gas. Environmentalists loved natural gas, but like ethanol and hydropower, it was a money grab. They are paid to oppose things and to give the impression that they are part of the solution, they also lobby for something that is mandated and subsidized by the government. Then they can turn it on and file a lawsuit over it. They cheered when Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore forced the EPA to approve ethanol and filed a lawsuit 15 years later. They demanded natural gas until it actually became affordable, then they wanted it gone, claiming “fracking” was draining the Earth and suing. They were in favor of dams, but when 60 percent of vegetables were grown using water from government dams and canals, they wanted them demolished. And so do states like California, struggling with debt, brownouts, and the highest energy costs in the country.(1)

Environmentalists want to block the new, cleaner power plant using the rules and blocks they wrote, and the craziest unscientific EPA in my lifetime is helping them. The Biden administration is helping environmental activists sue the Biden administration.

Our tax dollars at work.

The EPA claims that the environmental impact analysis of the new plant will not meet the standards of what the Biden administration’s epidemiologists say must be met under the revised National Environmental Policy Act. Yes, environmentalists want all energy plans to be halted unless the government somehow manages to plan for future regulations that may never exist.

There is no science involved, just epidemiologists using correlation. And EPA head Michael Regan, who has done more to undermine public confidence in EPA’s scientific understanding than anyone since the Carter years, is doing what he was already doing when I checked his bizarre testimony to Congress, which was know why he used armed federal agents to knock on farmers’ doors, using a never-enacted rule that was twice declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and asked TVA not to replace the coal plant unless it was powered by solar energy.

TVA doesn’t want to look like failures when they are one of the few government organizations that look like they understand the job, so they refused to take orders from EPA and install something that isn’t going to help, it will take too long, and they can’t cannot afford.

The only legitimate argument EPA had was that the Biden administration would give them subsidies to install solar. Yet TVA, nearly 70 percent of which were appointed by Biden, said no, for the best reason, one that Regan doesn’t understand; it’s not about doing progressive good works, it’s about affordable energy.

Solar and wind energy would be more expensive and less reliable for consumers. Giving the government a rebate will not change the laws of physics.

Imagine that. A public energy agency that cares about the public. It’s a surprise that Regan and other EPA bureaucrats didn’t burst into flames even when they read such a scientifically acute response.

So now that TVA is ignoring the EPA using language they got from environmental groups, environmental groups will have to do it themselves. They won’t be able to stop it at the Court of Appeal, they use science, but they really don’t want to stop it. They want to force the government to conduct another environmental review – and pay the environmental groups behind the lawsuit to conduct it.

COMMENTS:

(1) Politicians can’t really be stupid enough to believe that solar and wind energy are viable when everyone can see that the world has spent $4 trillion subsidizing them and changed existing energy needs by 0.1%. Except in California, where this summer they will ask the EPA again to waive emissions standards so they can burn enough fuel to prevent brownouts on hot days.