Hold onto your utility bills, folks—new revelations suggest the Biden-Harris administration may have played fast and loose with the facts to push their climate agenda through the EPA’s Clean Power Plan 2.0.
According to Just the News, this story boils down to allegations that the EPA hid or sanitized critical feedback from the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Lab (NETL) that challenged the feasibility of carbon capture technology central to the administration’s power plant rules.
Let’s rewind to the Obama era, where emails from 2009 showed the EPA’s endangerment finding on carbon dioxide emissions was a done deal before any public reveal, setting a precedent for bending science to fit policy.
Fast forward to March 2023, when the EPA under Biden-Harris sought NETL’s input on the soon-to-be-proposed Clean Power Plan 2.0 (CPP2), a rule mandating carbon capture tech for coal plants by 2039 and new gas plants by 2032.
But here’s the rub: NETL’s engineers provided comments disputing the tech’s readiness, only for those critiques to mysteriously vanish from the administrative record.
As Energy Secretary Chris Wright put it, “The Biden-Harris administration didn’t like what the study said, so they set out to produce one that would support the climate policies they wanted.” Talk about cherry-picking—turns out, inconvenient truths don’t make the cut when they clash with green dreams.
The CPP2 promotes carbon capture and underground storage (CCUS) as the silver bullet for emissions and cites a Canadian plant, Boundary Dam Unit #3 (BD3), to prove it’s “adequately demonstrated.”
Yet, a 2024 report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis called BD3 an “under-performing failure,” capturing just 57% of emissions through 2023, far below the promised 90%.
NETL engineers echoed this, noting BD3 hit that 90% target for only two months in over eight years, hardly a ringing endorsement for mandating this tech across America’s power grid.
Even more damning, NETL comments argued BD3’s consistent failure to meet emissions goals over a full year—ending less than a year ago—undermines any claim of “adequate demonstration.”
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., didn’t mince words in December 2023, stating the hidden feedback “cast significant doubt” on CPP2’s viability. When the watchdogs at Government Oversight and Accountability filed a FOIA request in April 2024, they discovered that officials had “sanitized” these critiques before adding them to the public record—now that’s a cleanup job worthy of a political thriller.
Experts have warned that pushing unproven tech like CCUS could spike electricity costs and destabilize the grid by sidelining reliable coal and gas for fickle wind and solar. Turns out, forcing a square peg into a round hole doesn’t just hurt—it costs.
The EPA’s modeling, as cited by the Louisiana Public Service Commission in October 2024, shows no new gas or coal plants with carbon capture through 2055, contradicting their public confidence in the tech.
Meanwhile, legal challenges continue to mount—two dozen states sued the EPA over related rules in May 2024, and the Supreme Court already struck down overreach in the original Clean Power Plan with its 2021 ruling in West Virginia v. EPA. If history is any guide, courts might not treat this sequel any more favorably.
So, while Biden and Obama pledged to “follow the science,” the scrubbed NETL comments suggest a different motto: follow the agenda. It’s a bitter pill for Americans facing higher energy bills to swallow, but sometimes the truth is the hardest policy to implement.
