Key Vote YES on the Energy Security and Affordability Act

As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your representative and ask that he or she vote YES on the Energy Security and Affordability Act, H.R. 3826.

Since President Obama assumed office, there has been an unabashed war on affordable and reliable energy spearheaded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and targeted at fossil fuel utilities, especially the coal industry. The Energy Security and Affordability Act will go a long way to roll back EPA’s current regulations, curb future efforts to attack America’s burgeoning domestic energy industry, and return much needed oversight of EPA rulemaking back to Congress.

The EPA has currently proposed, under questionable legality, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards for new fossil fuel-fired power plants. These standards, however, deliberately set GHG emission levels that don’t acknowledge inherent differences between common fuels like coal and natural gas and that are impossible to achieve by new coal-fired utilities. In effect, the EPA has backdoor-legislated a ban on new coal power plants that utilize America’s most affordable and abundant resource.

H.R. 3826 repeals these proposed GHG standards and forces EPA to come back to reality. The legislation requires that any future GHG emissions standards EPA proposes acknowledge the intrinsic differences between different fuel sources. Further EPA will not be allowed to set the bar of compliance on GHG regulations impossibly high as the legislation forces any new standards to be tailored to the emissions performance of at least six extant facilities in the United States over the course of a year.

The legislation not only protects the construction of new power plants, it also halts EPA’s effort to shutdown existing facilities through GHG regulation. The Energy Security and Affordability Act requires that any proposed GHG standards for existing power plants pass congressional muster. If EPA promulgates such regulations, it will be required to submit to Congress impact assessments that estimate the rule’s effects on economic growth, competitiveness, the labor market, and electricity rates. Further, EPA will be required to prove that the regulation will have a meaningful impact on global GHG output, not just domestic emissions. Finally, such a regulation, under H.R. 3826, would not take effect until an effective date is agreed to by Congress and passed into law.

This legislation is a meaningful and much needed restraint on EPA’s power and a desperately needed lifeline to American families and businesses struggling to keep their homes and factories warm and lit. The Energy Security and Affordability Act reemphasizes to EPA that they answer to Congress and the American people, not their own radical anti-coal agenda.

For these reasons, I urge you to call your representative and ask him or her to vote YES on the Energy Security and Affordability Act, H.R. 3826. We will count their vote as a KEY VOTE when calculating FreedomWorks’ Economic Freedom Scorecard for 2014. The Scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the FreedomFighter Award, which recognizes Members of Congress who consistently vote to support economic freedom.

Sincerely,

Matt Kibbe
President and CEO
FreedomWorks