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The Walter C. Beckjord Generating Station sits on the banks of the Ohio River, less than twenty miles southeast of Cincinnati, in Clermont County, Ohio. Beckjord offers a near-perfect case study of the costs of grandfathering. Construction of the plant was announced in November 1948, and its first 100-megawatt coal unit was operational by June 1952. Five additional units came online between 1953 and 1969. Because the units were constructed prior to 1971, all were exempt from the EPA’s New Source Performance Standards. For most of the 1970s, they also managed to avoid complying with any emission limitation under Ohio’s implementation plan for meeting the sulfur dioxide NAAQS, even though Ohio’s original plan, approved by the EPA in 1972, would have subjected Beckjord to a state emission standard—1.6 pounds of SO2 per million Btus of heat input—that was only 33 percent less stringent than the federal new-source standard of 1.2 lbs/MMBtu. In 1973, Ohio utilities convinced the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to invalidate the Ohio plan on procedural grounds. The court ordered the EPA to hold an additional hearing at which regulated plants could voice their objections, but before the agency could oblige, the governor of Ohio withdrew the plan from consideration. A year later, Ohio submitted a far less stringent proposal that would have allowed Beckjord to continue emitting at its uncontrolled level: 4.8 lbs/MMBtu. But that plan, too, was struck down on procedural grounds, this time by a state environmental review board. In 1976, after Ohio failed to offer any replacement for its second proposal, the EPA stepped in with a federal plan that would limit Beckjord’s emissions to 2.02 lbs/MMBtu. (This, according to the latest EPA computer modeling, was the level necessary for Ohio to attain the sulfur dioxide NAAQS.) After yet more litigation by Ohio utilities—including Beckjord’s owner, Cincinnati Gas & Electric—the bulk of the federal plan was upheld in 1978. (In rejecting the utilities’ challenge, the Sixth Circuit noted that Ohio was the only state in the country that still lacked an enforceable SO2 implementation plan.)

To Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, the threat was clear: “Mr. Speaker, there is a war being waged on energy and on coal in this country. But it’s not coming from another country, it is coming from our own government.” Her colleague, Mike Pompeo of Kansas, agreed: “President Obama’s War on Coal means fewer jobs and higher energy costs for Americans.” Those who believed otherwise, Virginia Representative David McKinley warned, were “in dangerous denial.” It was September 20, 2012, two months before a presidential election that would pit incumbent Barack Obama against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and the United States House of Representatives was preparing to vote on the bluntly titled Stop the War on Coal Act. Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee called the proposed legislation, which would strip the EPA of its power to regulate coal-mining operations and coal-fired power plants under a host of federal laws, “the single worst anti-environment bill to be considered in the House this Congress.” But the bill’s sponsors argued that significantly curtailing the EPA’s authority over the coal industry was the only way to prevent the President’s war from claiming “even more victims.” The Stop the War on Coal Act passed the House on September 21, 2012, in a 233–175 vote, with the support of nineteen Democrats. No one thought it had any chance of moving in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Instead, the House’s vote, which would be its last act before election day, was “only meant to be an instrument to bludgeon Obama and other Democrats,” as one commentator put it—a reminder to the coal-country electorate of the existential threat posed by the current President and his party. It hadn’t always been this way. On the contrary, four years earlier, Barack Obama had enjoyed a brief, involuntary tenure as the coal industry’s “spokesperson-in-chief.” About a month after Obama emerged victorious from the 2008 election, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a “partnership of the industries involved in producing electricity from coal,” released an advertisement made up entirely of video excerpts from a speech he had given at a September 2008 campaign rally in Lebanon, Virginia.