Among the countless issues and storylines that drove the historic 2016 presidential election, few if any drew a more striking contrast than the Trump and Clinton campaigns’ respective approach to energy policy, and coal in particular. Mrs.

After an extremely quiet summer, action on EPA’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) is set to heat up again, with oral arguments in the massive lawsuit to halt the regulations scheduled for next Tuesday.

Yogi Berra once famously said “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.” If he had been talking about EPA’s Regional Haze regulations, he could have been talking about a whole lot more nickels--$2 billion dollars worth to be exact.   

It was about a year ago that we posted a bit of analysis on the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) independent look at the economic and energy market impacts of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan (CPP) proposed rule. You can probably get a hint what we found out from the title—EIA Analysis Shows EPA’s Carbon Regulations All Economic Pain for No Climate Gain. We concluded that:

Take a look at the chart below, which was taken from a presentation made by Jim Skea, Co-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group III, to the Parties to UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) here in Bonn, Germany last week.

The curved line depicts what Mr. Skea describes as the increase in the “level of effort, as measured by carbon price” needed to limit the increase in the average global surface to no more than 2.0°C, the aspirational goal in the Paris Agreement. That’s some steep curve!