article_snippet.sent: This bias is created by how Environmental Protection Agency credits nuclear power in Environmental Protection Agency models of both current emissions and plan implementation.  
article_snippet.sent: EPA's modeling is divorced from reality.
article_snippet.sent: First, EPA's "Base Case for the Proposed Clean Power Plan" purports to depict the current state of the industry as the future would unfold without the Clean Power Plan.  
article_snippet.sent: EPA's implementation modeling, "Option 1 -- State,"  shows exactly the same situation: no new construction and 96 retirements by 2050.  
article_snippet.sent: In other words, EPA assumes that the industry is essentially phased out by 2050.
article_snippet.sent: These assumptions are tremendously important because These assumptions determine how emission targets are set and what state actions will receive credit toward those targets.
article_snippet.sent: A group of University of Tennessee graduate students made this point to EPA at a public hearing last summer.
article_snippet.sent: Using EPA's own data, the graduate students showed that EPA's energy policy plan creates incentives for states to shut down nuclear power plants and replace nuclear power plants with natural gas combined cycle plants.  
article_snippet.sent: the graduate students demonstrated that under this scenario, EPA's model shows emission reductions while real world emissions actually increase.
article_snippet.sent: President Obama's EPA has shifted President Obama's EPA position on nuclear energy and hidden that policy shift in a model.
article_snippet.sent: For example, when EPA modeled the Lieberman-Warner bill in 2008, President Obama's EPA indicated 44 nuclear plants would need to be built by 2030 in order to achieve the carbon reductions mandated in the Lieberman-Warner bill.
article_snippet.sent: EPA's modeling of the Lieberman-Warner bill showed the need to build 275 new nuclear plants by 2050 to meet the carbon reduction targets in the legislation.
article_snippet.sent: At a recent hearing in the Environment and Public Works Committee, Mary Nichols, chairman of the California Air Resources Board, told Congress that EPA looked at California's California Global Warming Solutions Act when developing EPA so-called Clean Power Plan and that EPA's plan adopts the same policy choices -- limited credit for either nuclear or hydropower -- both of which are carbon-free.
article_snippet.sent: Thus, EPA is assuming legislative powers and is making policy choices that favor some forms of carbon-free energy over others.
article_snippet.sent: Congress did not give EPA the authority to make policy choices that favor some forms of carbon-free energy over others, so instead policy choices that favor some forms of carbon-free energy over others have hidden policy choices that favor some forms of carbon-free energy over others in EPA's modeling of the 2009 Waxman-Markey bill.
article_snippet.sent: While I have long fought back on attempts for the federal government to tax carbon, I believe in an all-of-the-above energy strategy that provides our nation with energy security, and I have supported legislation that helps to clean the air.