WV Joins EPA Challenge

{Charleston, West Virginia}...Governor Earl Ray Tomblin has asked Attorney General Darrell McGraw to join a petition for review of the Environmental Protection Agency's MACT Rule. The petition, already signed by 21 other states, calls for a review in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The MACT Rule has caused electric utilities to announce plans to shut down coal-fired power plants, including in West Virginia, while the rule regulates emissions of hazardous air pollutants from coal-fired electric plants. Tomblin says this is a shining example of the EPA, an unelected federal bureaucracy, making policy without regard to the economic impact of its decisions, and he vows to continue to fight for West Virginia jobs and against the "EPA's ideologically driven, job-killing agenda." West Virginia joined 24 other states last year in filing a "friend of the court" brief in the underlying MACT Rule litigation.