As the Supreme Court set the stage for stricter environmental regulation this week, energy giant Dynegy bought out LS Power Group for $4 billion. The company’s Chairman and CEO Bruce Williamson shared insights on “Closing Bell.”
Williamson told CNBC's Melissa Francis that Dynegy has been ahead of the game: “We did a system-wide settlement with the EPA about three years ago,” he said. “What we did was put an umbrella agreement across all of our plants to drop the emissions 90%. We felt that it was an inevitability, that that’s where we were going to head in the country environmentally.”
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. Williamson said it would be more efficient to tax pollution than to trade credits. “The most efficient way to deal with it is probably to just put a tax in place, make it a federal program and then it’s a more even playing field all across the country,” he said.
Will Dynegy go private? Williamson said no: “Everything that we can do to run a company, we can do in public hands and public shareholders can benefit from that.”
