This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 26, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

New EPA rules governing pollution from power plants would seem to disproportionately harm coal-producing states, but the rules themselves

may simply be following what is likely to occur with current regulations anyway.

Peter Van Doren, editor of Regulation magazine, breaks down the repeated claims and the realities.

There's a clear disconnect here between what actually is going to happen with respect to coal-fired power plants and what is

believed that is going to happen to coal-fired power plants under the Clean Air Act under rules

proposed by the EPA and just to get some clarity here, to what extent does it matter that the EPA is proposing these rules?

One radical possibility is that it doesn't matter much at all.

That in fact the rule that was proposed is basically what's rule does.

The rule does.

Because of the radical change in the pricing of natural gas.

And describe what that, what the rule does.

The rule basically sets up state-based emission intensity guidelines, which is so many pounds of CO2 emissions per megawatt hour of electricity production by state.

And each state has a goal for reducing that intensity from its current level to a lower level.

In the end, the rule is 645 pages long I'm 300 pages into it and basically there's a very long

complicated description of how the EPA set these numbers for each particular state and why those

goals are reasonable. And if you read between the lines and over the next few weeks I'll try to actually figure out this question,

although I'm not able to precisely right now.

I'll give you a flavor of how much we've done already

to comply with the proposed rules for 2030.

The base year for this emissions level intensity setting is 2005.

...