August 2015

imagine the damage EPA could do to the electric grid

The irony with the Gold King Mine spill may be thicker than the toxic waste.  The same EPA, that apparently didn’t know what happens when you blow a hole in a dam, claims clairvoyance when it comes to predicting the future climate.  Three centuries into the future. And not just big-picture stuff.  For instance they have calculated the dollar impact your current microwave oven’s digital display will have on climate for every year until 2300 (this is not a joke).

However bad will be the impact of the Gold King Mine spill on the Colorado watershed, and on those who live near and depend on that water, the overall impact of the spill will be small compared to the damage that will be done by EPA’s affordable-energy-killing CO2 rule finalized recently.

Acting on their pretend knowledge of the future, the EPA issued the final version of the Clean Power Plan (CPP). The plan targets CO2 emissions but its supporters do a lot of hand waving to make people think CO2 is dirty.  It isn’t.  Carbon dioxide is colorless, odorless, and non-toxic.  Without CO2 there would be no green plants.  That’s right, Simba, without CO2 there would be no circle of life.  CO2 is also a necessary byproduct of getting energy from hydrocarbon fuels like natural gas, coal, and petroleum.

Natural gas and coal provide two-thirds of the electric power generated in the U.S. (petroleum is a non-player in power generation, accounting for about 1 percent of generation).  And there’s the rub.  In the U.S we have centuries of coal and gas reserves, but the CPP forces us to turn away from these most abundant, affordable, and reliable sources of electric power.  Taking a fuel like coal off the menu will only drive up the price of electricity and generate economic ripple effects that will cut income and destroy jobs.

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“The federal review of the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas has dragged on for nearly seven years, more than five times the average for such applications,” Josh Lederman of the Associated Press reports.

“The White House insists it’s simply following a standard and well-established process,” but AP’s analysis of data from the Federal Register, State Department records, congressional correspondence, Congressional Research Service reports, and pipeline owners suggests otherwise:

Under a George W. Bush-era executive order, oil pipelines crossing U.S. borders require a presidential permit, setting off a government-wide review coordinated by the State Department.

An Associated Press examination of every cross-border pipeline application since 2004, when Bush revised the process, shows that the Keystone review has been anything but ordinary.

Since April 2004, when Bush signed his order, the government has taken an average of 478 days — less than a year and a half — to approve or reject all other applications. TransCanada has waited nearly seven years for a ruling.

Moreover, former Bush White House officials who worked on the executive order say the State Department-coordinated process was intended to expedite approval of cross-border pipelines, not delay it:

Approving a pipeline permit “was seen as the most routine, boring thing in the world,” [said] Robert McNally, who was an energy adviser to Bush.

Here’s how the process is supposed to work:

Under Bush’s executive order, the State Department receives permit applications and circulates them to agencies such as the Commerce Department, Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency. The agencies have 90 days to offer opinions. If the State Department decides to grant approval, it notifies other agencies, which have 15 days to object before a permit is issued.

Yet:

More than 16 months have passed since the State Department’s 30-day public comment period ended. The State Department has not disclosed whether any agencies have objected to the pipeline. The department has said it is continuing to review the application “in a rigorous, transparent, and objective manner.” [click to continue…]

On Tuesday, August 11, the EPA Administrator, Gina McCarthy, will present a talk entitled “The Promise of the Clean Power Plan” at a Resources for the Future Policy Leadership Forum at 12:15 pm at the RFF auditorium at 1616 P Street, NW, Washington, DC.  Regarding the talk, former EPA official Alan Carlin has prepared the following handout on behalf of  the Cooler Heads Coalition:

You are unlikely to hear today why the EPA so-called “Clean Power Plan” (CPP) needs to be rescinded, so this is an alternative view for your consideration concerning the Plan:  [click to continue…]

Adding ethanol to gasoline makes it cleaner and reduces air pollution, right? So biofuel lobbyists would have us believe. However, a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) comes to the opposite conclusion.

Lead author Jason Hill of the University of Minnesota Department of Bioproducts and Biosystem Engineering summarized key findings of the study at a recent House Science Committee hearing. To determine which is cleaner, gasoline or ethanol, researchers must “compare these fuels over their full life cycle.” Hill explains:

That is, we need to consider the damage caused by producing them in addition to using them. For gasoline, the life cycle includes extracting and refining crude oil, and distributing and combusting the gasoline itself. The life cycle of corn ethanol includes growing and fermenting grain, and distilling, distributing, and combusting the ethanol itself.

Although combustion emissions from ethanol are lower than those of gasoline, production emissions from ethanol are higher. So much so that on a life-cycle basis, ethanol is the larger source of five different air pollutants: primary fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen oxides (NOx), amonia (NH3), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and sulfur oxides (SOx).

Those results are an additional reason EPA should resist pressure from biofuel lobbyists to increase Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2) blending targets for 2014-2016. As Hill cautions: [click to continue…]

President Barack Obama on 3rd August announced the EPA’s final rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants.  In doing so, the President has finally fulfilled a pledge he made when running for president in 2008.  Then-Senator Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2008 that, “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

The Existing Source Performance Standards (or ESPS) being applied under section 111d of the Clean Air Act to coal- and gas-fired power plants already in operation are called by the EPA the “Clean Power” Plan. Don’t buy it.  More accurate names would be the Costly Power Plan or the Skyrocketing Rates Power Plan (h/t Alan Carlin) or the Obama Power Grab (h/t Senator McConnell’s office) or the National Energy Tax (h/t Speaker Boehner’s office).

The final ESPS is 1560 pages.  The final rule is significantly different from the proposed rule released in June 2014.  In fact, it is so different that the legal case has already been made that it is a brand new rule and therefore EPA must start the rulemaking process all over again.

Here are some of the major changes from the proposed to the final rule.  EPA has extended the deadlines by two years, but has also increased the emissions reductions that must be achieved by 2030 from 30% to 32% below the 2005 baseline.  The proposed rule contained four “building blocks” by which States can meet their individual targets.

The final rule lowers its estimates of reductions that can be made from building block one—efficiency improvements in generating plants—from 6% to 2-4%.  Reliance on building block two—replacing coal-fired plants with natural gas-fired plants—has been reduced, while reliance on replacing coal with renewable energy sources (building block three), such as windmills and solar panels, has been increased.  And EPA has dropped gains in energy efficiency (building block four) entirely, although States can still count any emissions reductions that result from efficiency gains.

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EPA’s final “Carbon Pollution Standards” rule, released today, requires new coal-fired power plants to meet a standard of 1,400 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour (1,400 lbs. CO2/MWh) — less stringent than the 1,100 lbs. CO2/MWh standard in the agency’s Jan. 2014 proposed rule.

Under §111 of the Clean Air Act, performance standards are to reflect the “best system of emission reduction” (BSER) that has been “adequately demonstrated,” taking “cost” into account.

EPA says the final standard “better represents the requirement that the BSER be implementable at reasonable cost.” That’s a face-saving way of saying the agency’s original proposal would not have survived judicial review.

Although not as blatantly unreasonable, the rule remains fatally flawed. [click to continue…]

President Obama has not yet unveiled EPA’s final “Clean Power Plan” rule, but EPA has posted six so-called fact sheets. A few whoppers and rhetorical tricks in the preview “fact sheet” jump out at me.

Much of it is devoted to preaching the message that climate change endangers public health and welfare:

2014 was the hottest year in recorded history, and 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all occurred in the first 15 years of this century. Recorded temperatures in the first half of 2015 were also warmer than normal. 

Not so fast. If 2014 was the warmest year, it was so by 0.02ºC — one-fifth of the 0.1ºC margin of error in surface temperature records. Accordingly, NOAA assigned 2014 a 48% probability of being the warmest year; NASA, a 38% probability.

Based on more reliable satellite data, 2014 was the 3rd or 6th warmest year in the record.

Besides, what really matters in assessing climate change risk is how fast the planet is warming compared to the forecasts on which scary-sounding climate impact scenarios are based. Here’s the big picture you won’t see in EPA’s “fact sheets”:

In the latest (UAH V.6) version of the University of Alabama in Huntsville satellite record, the lower atmosphere warming rate of the past 36 years is 0.114ºC/decade — about the same rate the IPCC projects in its most aggressive emission-reduction scenario (RCP2.6). Is this a great atmosphere, or what?*

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