What  coincidences.

First I get an e-mail from a PR firm touting a right-wing economist’s claim that the EPA Clean Power Plan to reduce power plant pollution is costly to electric customers and thus we should be happy Donald Trump has named a climate change denier and coal-burning proponent, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, to head the EPA.

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Then, Arkansas’s leading dirty air proponent, Republican Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, announced she’d written an op-ed for Fox News to regurgitate assembly line talking points about the evils of regulations such as those intended to ensure clean air and water advocated by the EPA.

Then, Rutledge announces a, cough, “bipartisan” (maybe one Democrat or so) letter from 23 states encouraging the Trump administration to nix the Clean Power Plan she and others have busily been fighting in federal court (while ignoring local issues.) They want an executive order by Trump on the first day he’s in office to state the EPA has no power to adopt the rule and directing the agency to take no further action.

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As Ernest Dumas has patiently and repeatedly explained,  the rules are good for America. And the cost is being wildly overstated in part because many electric utilities, including Entergy in Arkansas, have been switching from coal to cheaper gas generating fuel and aren’t looking back.

Don’t tell it to Rutledge, who prefers the interests of coal companies and railroads over the lungs of Arkansans.

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“President-elect Trump has made it clear he wants to reduce the regulatory burden on all Americans,” said Attorney General Rutledge. “Along with my colleagues, I am urging the President-elect, along with Congress, to act quickly to remove one of the most sweeping environmental regulations this country has seen and one that will cause electric rates across the country to skyrocket.”

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