The Myth that ‘Business’ Hated Obama’s Clean Power Plan

“It was really just a small minority of businesses that were against it.”

The Trump administration has long portrayed the Clean Power Plan, a signature Obama-era initiative to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, as a policy overreach that was bound to cost the economy jobs and constrain economic growth.  That’s why, in announcing Monday he would repeal the Clean Power Plan, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt said that the reversal was a way of listening to the needs of businesses.  Regulations “ought to work with folks all over the country and say, how do we achieve better incomes by working with industry, not against industry,” Pruitt said Monday, in Hazard, Kentucky.

He was partially correct.  Some business groups did indeed laud the reversal Tuesday.  The president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute said that the group had “always believed that there is a better way to approach greenhouse gas regulations than the [Clean Power Plan].”  Peabody, the nation’s biggest private-sector coal company, said it supported the repeal, adding that the plan would have raised power costs and damaged reliability.

But the Clean Power Plan, which which would have required states to meet certain individualized targets to limit emissions from existing power plants, was also supported by a wide array of businesses.  Many big companies that have publicly pledged to reduce their environmental footprint would have been happy to see a shift toward more renewable energy, and even stood to benefit from it if it brought their energy costs down.  The divide highlights something that is becoming increasingly obvious as the Trump administration rolls back various Obama-era policies:  The business world isn’t a monolith, and some benefit from regulations that others detest.
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The list of companies supporting the Clean Power Plan raises the question of who Pruitt was referring to when he said the Trump administration wanted to work with, rather than against, industry.  The companies supporting the Clean Power Plan are among the biggest employers in the country, and also contribute the most to economic growth—the four combined tech companies have a market value of $1.7 trillion.

There may have been some reason for small manufacturers to be worried about the Clean Power Plan, according to Stephen Munro, a policy specialist at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research firm.  A credit system set up through the Clean Power Plan to incentivize low-carbon energy could have raised the cost of electric power.  Opposition was really concentrated among small and mid-sized manufacturers that were big consumers of power, including the metals industry and textile companies, he said.

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