Rich Miller’s weekly column addresses Pat Quinn’s disappearance and points out the most egregious of sell outs by the Blagojevich administration–the delaying of regulatory review of coal powered sources. The sound from Quinn–silence. What good is it to be reelected if you are a political eunich.
But getting back to the Blagojevich administration’s decision, it could be worse, but it’s hard to say how. The reasoning is that because the feds are putting in new rules eventually, Illinois should wait. The argument goes that putting new regulations on Illinois would lead, under a deregulated energy market in Illinois, to power plants being built in other states leaving Illinois with fewer sources of power and less ability to regulate those who ship power to Illinois.
The irony of the above is that a deregulated industry is actually not causing fits of laughter as they try and encourage deregulation while saying it could lead to an inability to regulate power if we enforce current clean air laws. But why doesn’t that matter in Illinois? No ones paying attention.
Of course, what this misses is that power production is not highly relocatable. Certainly you can build some over the borders and you can transmit it, but economically it still doesn’t make sense to send it to far or the loss in the wires makes the costs too high. It’s a bogus threat to say you’ll relocate to other states at this point. The technology isn’t that good yet.
That said, the cost factor of only looking at what it costs Illinoisans in the short term avoids the point that eventually the EPA will have to address these problems. If Illinois is ahead of the curve, it can actually create an environment where utilities are geared up to deal with stricter standards and set it so the incentive system to get there is the least disruptive.
But The Blagorgeous won’t make that argument–instead he decided to look around and go, “Everyone else is doing it.”
ArchPundit