Don van der Vaart, John Locke Foundation senior fellow and former secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, writes for North State Journal that the free market is accomplishing decreasing green house gas emissions without government regulation.

The latest annual report by British Petroleum on Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions once again serves to remind us that the previous administration’s so-called Clean Power Plan (CPP) may simply have been an attempt to claim credit for what the (somewhat) free market was already achieving.

What is important is that the (somewhat) free market has created these reductions without the aid of an undoubtedly illegal government intervention into our electricity industry. Thanks to the historic development of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, natural gas prices have made baseload electricity generation using natural gas economical in many cases.

Van der Vaart writes that many restrictions still exist in the power market (read about them in his piece) but that states are moving forward with market-driven choices. State-level decisions are leading to significant reductions in GHG emissions and at lower costs to ratepayers.