Wyoming will not participate in the federal Climate Pollution Reduction Grant program, deciding instead to turn down $3 million and an opportunity to apply for more funding from the $4.6 billion federal effort.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Gov. Mark Gordon said, insisted on revising the state’s draft “Cowboy State Pollution Reduction Plan” application and removing flexibility for how the state could spend federal dollars from future Climate Pollution Reduction Grant awards.
“For Wyoming, this amounts to a classic bait-and-switch,” Gordon said in a prepared statement this week.
The CPRG program, funded via the Inflation Reduction Act, aims to help states reduce “greenhouse gas emissions and other harmful air pollution,” according to the EPA.
More simply, the EPA wants to fund the home-grown climate-pollution-reduction plans states will use to comply with a flurry of climate and environment rules coming down the pike.
But negotiations between the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality and the EPA on developing a Wyoming plan didn’t go well, Gordon said. He concluded that the “EPA will turn Wyoming and other states’ planning efforts upside down into a mandate to prematurely shut down Wyoming’s ‘all-of-the-above’ energy development approach,” he wrote in a Nov. 30 letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan.
“EPA worked closely and constructively with Wyoming to incorporate the state’s feedback into its CPRG grant documents,” EPA Communications Director Nick Conger told WyoFile. “In the case of Wyoming, we prepared an award amendment that addressed its requests and aligned with its submitted work plan.”
While individual municipalities may also apply to the program to collaborate with EPA on climate pollution reduction efforts, Conger said, “with the state’s withdrawal, most communities across the state will no longer have the opportunity to collaborate on a plan to cut pollution or to apply for the $4.6 billion in additional CPRG funds to implement these types of innovative projects.”
However, EPA is still exploring whether Wyoming’s two largest cities might still be eligible to participate.
Meantime, Gordon proposes adding $3.4 million to Wyoming DEQ’s biennial budget of about $174 million, citing ongoing demands of meeting federal mandates.
“This overall proposal of $3.4 million at DEQ is necessary for Wyoming to control her own destiny in the current environment of federal activism,” Gordon said in his budget letter to the Legislature.
Loggerheads with EPA
Though Wyoming has won numerous federal grants — including several Department of Energy energy innovation programs — Gordon’s “all-of-the-above” energy strategy and approach to making Wyoming a “carbon negative” state frequently clash with the EPA’s federal climate and pollution rules. A row over regional haze controls at the Jim Bridger coal-fired power plant near Rock Springs in 2022, for example, prompted potential “corrective actions” by EPA that would have shut down half the power plant.
The Jim Bridger showdown, the EPA’s proposed power plant rule and the agency’s final “methane rule,” all exemplify the federal government’s “heavy-handed” approach, according to Gordon, and threaten Wyoming’s aims for carbon capture and keeping the state’s fossil fuels in the nation’s energy mix.
“EPA will turn Wyoming and other states’ planning efforts upside down into a mandate to prematurely shut down Wyoming’s ‘all-of-the-above’ energy development approach.”
Gov. Mark Gordon
“EPA’s pending 70 air quality rules this year will heap a massive amount of new federal requirements on Wyoming that will have lasting significant economic impacts for Wyoming citizens, create regulatory uncertainty and require states to do more with less,” Gordon wrote to Regan.
Just a few months ago, Gordon hosted Regan on a tour of Wyoming and both agreed to continue to work on technology advancements to launch commercial-scale carbon capture. Whether Wyoming’s overall climate-and-fossil-fuels approach is on pace with the Biden administration’s climate priorities is another, more complicated legal matter, Regan said.
The EPA is “exploring opportunities through regulation and innovative technologies on how we begin to control those [carbon dioxide] emissions so that we don’t exacerbate the climate crisis,” Regan told reporters in Laramie in August. “I think [President Biden] has been very clear that we believe that we must respond with a sense of urgency.”
Good job, Governor Gordon, turn down federal money and deprive your own people of the help they need to transition off polluting coal. A coal industry lobbyist could do no better. The only WY state “planning” so far is to pull more coal out of the ground and blow it into the atmosphere and an overheated future.
So what are the specific restrictions that the EPA put on the State that killed this for Gordon? I would like to know what are the specifics, and I can’t find them anywhere, just vague platitudes. It would be nice to know what the breakout per state/capita, or however the 4.6 billion is supposed to shared. I read somewhere that there was over 200 million in income to the State in stripper wells would be shut down with the 3 million. Is that what the the EPA wants or is restricted to? In the mean time Gordon is wanting to keep the oil and gas and coal industries going while we supposedly cut emissions. That is like trying to stop a train wreck by grabbing onto the caboose. Anybody remember when trains had those? Anyway, stop the lying hydrocarbon industry and have them pay for the damage they have done in the last 200 years. We have known about the costs of CO2 in the atmosphere since Eunice Newton Foote published in 1856.
Whadda guy! Besides, Wyoming has plenty of money, including $10 million for a shooting gallery to please insecure popgunners!
Competition will find fossil fuels their place in the world.
Our elected leaders are low IQ because the voters are low IQ. The EPA is an illegitimate bastard child of the Nixon Era, and as such should be treated that way. While you’re feeling so much relief from the tentacles of the federal gummint’s paltry offer, would you mind rejecting the hiway funds as well so we don’t have to reset our damned clocks every 6 months?
What do federal highway funds have to do with daylight savings? Colorado voted to opt out, so it seems that clock problem should be put on the ballot. It seems the Fed’s don’t want these funds to subsidize coal.
The original means of initiating DLST was federal hiway funds. Whatever tricks the federal government uses now, I know not. And the clock issue was put on the ballot, but was tabled, or altered and never made it out of committee. I couldn’t care less about what Colorado does, btw. Colorado is a lost cause, but Wyomingites are tired of the bi annual duggary of the clock change.
And here I thought that the DST nonsense originated during the first war of the world as a propaganda measure to ensure that people thought of the government as all-powerful; so powerful that the morons could even control time… Even that dolt, Bush the second, monkeyed with it during his big war with Iraq, based entirely on lies.
Guv Gordo did the right thing for the wrong reasons in turning down the $ 3 million EPA grant. It’s a pittance. An insultingly low dollar amount of appeasement. Shows how little the Feds think of Wyoming’s worth. Crumbs , not cake. Rejecting the money looks good in the right wing media, though.
A lefthanded compliment to our short minded narrow minded close minded Governor . He can’t be wrong on fossil fuels all the time .
I agree with Dewey this time…that those dollars to Wyoming are condescending and show little respect for us as a State or as people.
Every state in the country got the same opportunity for this planning grant–$3 million. Since we’re the least populous state in the country, we actually would have gotten the most money of any state on a per capita basis. Those are our tax dollars. Now they will go to another state.
Margie,
“Wyoming will not participate in the federal Climate Pollution Reduction Grant program, deciding instead to turn down $3 million and an opportunity to apply for more funding from the $4.6 billion federal effort.”
Clearly, it isn’t a decision about $3 million with $4.6 Billion to follow. And if our Governor starts making decisions about Wyoming based on per capita measures, we might have to have him checked for cognitive decline.
Federal Grants come with federal controls. Those people in DC, tend to treat us as potential victims of financial fraud. “Here, is a pile of cash… we just printed it… don’t mind that we borrowed from the Chinese for it… what inflation… we are from the federal government and we are here to help?”
This was a good decision, apparently for the perspective of the political left and right.
That good they should also reject all federal dollars that our representatives and senators don’t vote for. All that COVID money and build back better funds should be reimbursed to the federal government and sent to states that want to work with our federal partners.