Energy policy in Georgia isn’t made by the State legislature. Nor is it made by Governor Nathan Deal. Indeed, energy policy in Georgia isn’t made by any public official in the State. Instead, the most important energy decisions in Georgia are rendered by unelected EPA bureaucrats and environmentalist lawyers.
Welcome to energy policymaking in the Obama age.
Georgia is one of the fastest growing States in the nation. With more people necessarily comes higher demand for electricity. In order to meet the State’s growing need for power, a consortium of non-profit local utilities known as Power4Georgians (P4G) planned on building two 850 megawatt coal fired power plants, one in Washington County and the other in Ben Hill County.
P4G intended to build the Washington County plant first, but the project has been held in up for two years in the courts by relentless anti-coal environmentalist litigation organizations led by the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal Campaign.” This is demonstrated by the following brief timeline:
- On April 8, 2010, the Georgia Environmental Protection Division issued the final air permits for Power4Georgian’s proposed coal-fired power plant in Washington County. They were immediately challenged by environmentalist litigants led by the Sierra Club.
- On December 16, Georgia Judge Ronit Walker ruled in favor of the environmentalist petitioners and rejected the air permit for Power4Georgians’ proposed coal-fired power plant in Washington County.
- On November 21, 2011, Georgia environmental regulators re-issued an air permit for the proposed coal-fired power plant in Washington Country.
- On December 16, 2012 the Southern Environmental Law Center and GreenLaw challenged the Georgia Environmental Protection Division’s air quality permit in the Georgia Office of State Administrative Hearings on behalf of the Fall-line Alliance for a Clean Environment, Ogeechee Riverkeeper, Sierra Club’s Georgia Chapter, and Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.
EPA acted as a de facto intervener on behalf the environmentalist petitioners. As this blog has explained repeatedly, EPA is now waging a regulatory war on the coal industry. The Agency is imposing a series of senseless regulations that serve no public health purpose, and whose only function seems to be to price coal out of the electricity market.
In particular, the challenges brought by Sierra Club et al. relied on EPA’s ridiculous Mercury and Air Toxics Standard. By EPA’s own estimate, the mercury regulation would cost $10 billion annually, and its purpose is to protect America’s supposed population of pregnant, subsistence fisherwomen, who consume more than 300 pounds per year of self caught fish from fresh, inland water bodies. EPA fails to identify any of these purported victims. Rather, they are modeled to exist.
Earlier this week, the environmentalist obstructionists in Georgia announced that they would drop their latest legal challenge, based on the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard, in exchange for P4G’s commitment to install additional controls at the Washington County plant. In addition, P4G agreed to abandon its plan to build a second coal fired power plant in Ben Hill County.
To be sure, Sierra Club and its cohorts were not acting in good faith. They even admitted as much. In this week’s settlement, the environmentalist litigants agreed to drop its challenge predicated on the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, but, at the same time, they announced they would continue to object to the plant based on EPA’s recently proposed Carbon Pollution Standard*. That regulation, a proposal of which was published in today’s federal register, would effectively ban the construction of new coal fired plants. In an interview about the settlement in Wednseday’s Energy and Environment GreenWire, Jenna Garland of the Sierra Club said that, “Sierra Club and our other organizations believe that Plant Washington should need to pursue carbon pollution compliance.”
To recap the madcap: In order to meet the Peach State’s growing demand, a consortium of local utilities decided to build two coal fired power plants. Twice, Georgia public officials approved air permits for one coal fired power plant in Washington County. And twice, these State decisions were effectively invalidated by environmentalist lawyers, who challenged the permits based on nonsensical anti-coal regulations issued by President Obama’s EPA. As a result of this legal wrangling, the utility consortium agreed to cancel plans for its other planned power plant in Ben Hill County. Now, the environmentalists will launch a fresh attack in the courts on the remaining plant.
President Eisenhower wisely and presciently warned against a then-gathering (and long since entrenched) military industrial complex. A similarly sinister force is fast arising in the Obama age–the anti-industrial legal complex. Legions of environmentalist lawyers, backed by EPA’s outrageous mandates, are overwhelming local authority on energy policy with endless petitions. Only a decade ago, local officials and business decided how to invest in electricity generation; today, alarmingly, those decision are made by environmental lawyers and federal bureaucrats.
*My colleague Marlo Lewis recently wrote this excellent blog on the strangeness of the Carbon Pollution Standard.
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In Europe is the same. Organizations like ‘Client Earth’ efficiently block investments in coal-fired generation
Environmentalist groups, and a lot of feet on the ground (regular citizens) fought against these coal-fired power plants. With a few favorable court rulings, these plants were rejected. Oh, by-the-way Georgia’s EPD (Environmental Protection Division) showed that it was a tool of the power companies by repeatedly granting permits. They claimed that they were only following the law. So, their co-conspirators are Georgia’s lawmakers (wholly owned subsidiary of the power companies).
The author of this piece is apparently unaware of the long standing advisories warning against over consumption of locally fresh caught fish. These advisories exist due to mercury contamination. These advisories are present in 48 out of 50 states. In fact every waterway tested by the EPA has contaminated fish. Let me repeat that so as to give skeptics the opportunity to look up the facts on this. Every stream, river and lake that the EPA has tested over the past ten years has contaminated fish. Oh, you say the mercury levels aren’t that high, the EPA has to strict of criteria when it comes to safe levels of mercury. So, you have to rely now on your conspiracy that all science, scientists and the scientific method are corrupt. I love that one, it’s very funny.
The environmentalists used the mercury standards to win their legal cases. They did not rely on the climate change argument. Even though that argument is possibly more compelling. Again, the skeptics have to rely on a conspiracy theory.
The funniest part of this piece comes as a grand punchline at the end. The conspiracy against energy progress (Edison would find this phrase ironically funny in the context of coal-fired power plants being equated with progress in the 21st century) is orchestrated by Obama. Amazingly funny!
Greetings DMAC,
RE: “The author of this piece is apparently unaware of the long standing advisories warning against over consumption of locally fresh caught fish. These advisories exist due to mercury contamination. These advisories are present in 48 out of 50 states.”
I am aware of these notices. Indeed, they are a key component of my argument that EPA’s mercury regulation is a joke. EPA’s regulatory rationale for that rule is to protect a make believe population–namely, pregnant, subsistence fisherwomen, who consumer 300 pounds of self-caught fish from only the 99th percentile most polluted inland freshwater bodies, despite the presence of myriad placards and warning along those waterways. Please see, “EPA’s Big Mercury Lie,” which was linked to in the post, available here: http://www.globalwarming.org/2012/01/04/the-big-mercury-lie/
RE: “So, you have to rely now on your conspiracy that all science, scientists and the scientific method are corrupt.”
Not so! Please see the link above. It is EPA’s own science that renders ridiculous the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard.
RE: “They did not rely on the climate change argument. Even though that argument is possibly more compelling. Again, the skeptics have to rely on a conspiracy theory.”
Exactly! And that’s what I wrote–the anti-industrial legal complex used the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule to get a promise that the second coal plant won’t be built. And now, it promises to use the Carbon Pollution Rule to try to prevent the Washington County plant from being built.
If you are wondering where’s the damage from these coal-fired power plants, here’s your evidence as printed in today’s edition of Macon Georgia’s, The Telegraph:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that up to 1 in 50 residents nationally who live near ash ponds could get cancer from the arsenic leaking into wells. The EPA also predicts that unlined ash ponds can increase other health risks, such as damage to the liver, kidneys and central nervous system, from contaminants such as lead.
Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2012/04/14/1990320/plant-scherer-ash-pond-worries.html#storylink=cpy
RE: “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that up to 1 in 50 residents nationally who live near ash ponds could get cancer from the arsenic leaking into wells.”
How is this “evidence”? It’s a poorly referenced paragraph, written in the conditional, published in a local newspaper. I’d have to see the actual study, but I take it with a shaker of salt, in light of EPA’s bogus mercury “science” (see link above), its equally bogus mountaintop removal “science,” and also its absurd visibility “science.”
For more, please see:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/48816594/William-Yeatman-EPA-Guilty-of-Environmental-Hyperbole
and
http://www.scribd.com/doc/70535520/William-Yeatman-EPA-s-Shocking-New-Mexico-Power-Grab
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