You might be surprised to learn that this blog entry has nothing to do with John Hood. Instead, John Siciliano of the Washington Examiner invokes the “Star Trek” hero for his latest column.

Given the increasingly complex world of Environmental Protection Agency rules, some are tapping unlikely sources of inspiration in coping with the regulatory hardships, namely Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock.

“If you are old enough to remember the original ‘Star Trek,’ the three-dimensional chess that used to be played by Captain Kirk and Spock. Well, that’s kind of what we’re doing” to comply with the EPA, said Sue Kelly, president and CEO of the American Public Power Association, representing the country’s large swath of publicly owned power companies.

She dropped the Kirk reference at a recent workshop in Washington on how states can comply in meeting the centerpiece of the president’s climate change agenda, called the Clean Power Plan.

In the Star Trek series, the three-dimensional chess game had three overlapping boards, with any move on one board helping or hindering your position on the two other boards suspended above one another.

Based on Kelly’s analogy, the bottom chess board would be the EPA’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Above that would be the threat of power outages, commonly phrased as “reliability concerns,” from the plan forcing coal-fired power plants to close and not adequately taking into account the time needed to build new power stations and transmission lines.

Above that is the floating chess board of states’ compliance plans, which are required to meet different emission reduction targets under the plan. What one state chooses to do will affect another. For example, if Missouri closes a plant, how does that affect a city in Arkansas that buys power from that plant?

Kelly said the EPA is “fuzzy” on a lot of those issues, if it addresses them at all.