Trump repealed Biden's greenhouse gas requirements for power plants. The regulations are gone. Utilities can exhale.
Biden spent years crafting rules to force coal and gas plants to cut emissions or shut down. Trump signed paperwork and deleted them. This took less time than your average earnings call where the CEO explains why guidance was just a suggestion.
The environmental groups are furious. The utility executives are relieved. The retail traders who bought clean energy ETFs at the top are checking their portfolios and discovering that virtue signaling does not, in fact, offset capital losses.
Here's what actually happened. Obama tried to regulate power plant emissions. The Supreme Court blocked him. Biden tried again with different legal language. Trump repealed it before the Supreme Court could bother showing up. This is the regulatory equivalent of watching someone rebuild a sandcastle at high tide while insisting the ocean respects precedent.
Coal stocks rallied for six hours. Then investors remembered that natural gas is cheaper and coal plants are still unprofitable. The stocks gave back the gains. Some junior analyst at a regional bank probably wrote a note explaining how this creates a buying opportunity in thermal coal. That analyst's clients are now underwater on positions that were obsolete before the ink dried.
The power companies never wanted to comply with the regulations. They also never wanted to defend repealing them. Now they get to do neither and both. They'll keep closing coal plants because the math demands it, but they'll blame market forces instead of federal mandates. This allows them to fire people without looking like they care about carbon.
The Biden administration spent three years writing rules that lasted eight months. The lawyers who drafted them billed $800 an hour. The consultants who modeled compliance costs billed $600 an hour. The lobbyists who fought the rules billed $1,200 an hour. Everyone made money except the people who thought buying FirstEnergy would save the polar bears.
Photo by LukΓ‘Ε‘ LehotskΓ½ on Unsplash
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