June 2011

Yesterday morning, the Energy Opportunity program at the Center for American Progress, a leading liberal think tank, held a panel on the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed “Utility MACT” rule to regulate coal- and oil-fired power plants under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act. This rule, if implemented, would be one of the costliest regulations, ever, and its primary justification is to protect pregnant, subsistence fisherwomen from the deposition onto inland, freshwater bodies of mercury emitted from American power plants. Notably, U.S. power plants contribute 2 percent of total mercury deposition across America, so they are a rather small component of this supposed problem. In future posts, I’ll contend that there are more reasonable methods of protecting the scores (hundreds?) of pregnant women who are also subsistence fishers, other than overhauling the electricity generation industry at a cost of $10 billion annually (EPA’s estimate) to $100 billion annually (industry’s estimate). In this post, I only want to note how extraordinarily unfair and unbalanced was the Center for American Progress’s panel yesterday. Consider the panelists:

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Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on carbon dioxide provided some welcome relief to those concerned that the Court might say something, deliberately or otherwise, that would buttress the claims of global warming alarmists.  The Court said no such thing.  In fact, it seemed to step back from the suggestions in its 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA ruling that the scientific debate over anthropogenic warming had largely been settled.  Yesterday’s ruling does mention hurricanes and heat-related deaths and melting ice-caps, but only in characterizing EPA’s view of global warming, not the Court’s.  And the Court quickly distances itself from EPA’s views with an interesting footnote:

“For views opposing EPA’s, see, e.g., Dawidoff, The Civil Heretic, N. Y. Times Magazine 32 (March 29, 2009). The Court, we caution, endorses no particular view of the complicated issues related to carbon dioxide emissions and climate change.”

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In mid-April, I testified before a Colorado Senate Committee that was considering whether to approve a Regional Haze State Implementation Plan (“RHSIP”) to improve visibility at National Parks. The purpose of my testimony was to inform Committee Members that the RHSIP before them violated Colorado’s statutory prohibition on pollution controls pursuant to the Clean Air Act that are more stringent than what the federal government requires. That is, I told them that the RHSIP was illegal. I explained to the Senators that correcting the illegal components of the RHSIP would save Colorado ratepayers more than $120 million. (For background on the RHSIP, click here. Video of my testimony is available here.)

The Committee heard an entirely different story from lawyers representing natural gas producers,  Xcel Energy, and environmentalist ex-Governor Bill Ritter. These lawyers’ clients were staunch proponents of the RHSIP, because it included a strategy to switch fuels from coal to natural gas for almost 1,000 megawatts of electricity. For the gas and utility sector, billions of dollars were at stake; for ex-Governor Ritter, the fuel switching plan enhanced his national profile among environmentalists. These special interest lawyers refused to address my allegations of illegality (because I was right). Instead, they told the Committee that unless the General Assembly approved the RHSIP immediately and without alteration, the federal government would swoop in and usurp Colorado’s air quality planning authority.

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