Reducing pollution does not threaten the Montana economy

NorthWestern Energy (NWE) recently forecast that federal efforts to stabilize our climate by reducing the amount of carbon pollution are bound to do significant and permanent damage to the Montana economy. In NWE’s scare story, the only way that Montana can meet its obligations under the EPA’s Clean Power Plan is to shut down all four of the Colstrip electrical generators by 2022, eliminate the coal mine that fuels them, abandon the high voltage Colstrip power line, and build expensive replacements for them all.

To get these dire results, NWE had to develop a domino theory of cascading...