William Yeatman

While campaigning for the Presidency, then-Senator Barack Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that he would “bankrupt” the coal industry. Today, the Environmental Protection Agency busily endeavors to fulfill the President’s pledge by imposing unnecessary regulations that are virtually impossible for coal-fired power plants to achieve.

Consider the Utility MACT rule, which seeks to cut US power plants’ emissions of mercury from 29 tons a year to just five. Yet EPA itself estimates that cutting even as much as 41 tons out of total emissions of 105 tons “is unlikely to substantially affect total risk.” In order to achieve these non-existent benefits, the EPA set emissions thresholds that no power plant currently meets.

Then there’s the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule. Texas was excluded from the proposed rule. In the final rule, however, Texas was included, due to the supposed need to slightly reduce emissions as monitored 500 miles away in Madison County, Ill.—a locale that meets the EPA air-quality standards in question. The EPA ordered the Lone Star State to reduce sulfur-dioxide emissions 47 % within 6 months, despite the fact that it takes 3 years to install sulfur “scrubber” retrofits on coal-fired power plants.

Already, the electricity industry is sounding the alarm that the regulatory burden is going to take a big toll on power production. Earlier this month, Southern Power, the largest American utility, reported that the EPA’s proposed regulations would necessitate the closing of 4,000 megawatts of coal-fired power, and also $10 to $18 billion for new emissions reductions equipment. In June, American Electric Power, the third largest utility, announced that its plan to comply with pending air quality regulations would shutter 6,000 megawatts of coal power, and spend $6 billion to $8 billion on emissions controls.

[click to continue…]

I’ve written before about how the EPA cannot control the regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. My colleague Marlo Lewis knows this topic better than anyone, and I recommend reading this, this, and this, if you want to grasp the nitty-gritty details. Here’s our thesis in a nutshell:

Regulating air quality under the Clean Air Act is like eating Pringels: Once you pop, you can’t stop. That is, the Clean Air Act is structured such that regulation begets more regulation. This chain reaction is a major reason why the Obama administration’s decision to regulate greenhouse gases pursuant to the Clean Air Act was either foolish or diabolical. In so doing, the Environmental Protection Agency opened Pandora’s Box. It wants to choose when and where it regulates greenhouse gases, but it doesn’t have this discretion. Environmentalist special interests can and will use the courts to force the EPA’s hand. By the same token, however, this means EPA can use such suits as political cover, claiming it does not want to regulate this or that industry, or does not want to regulate under this or that Clean Air Act provision, but has no choice because ‘the court made us do it.’

The latest link in this runaway chain reaction is an environmentalist lawsuit launched this week that seeks to limit the EPA’s discretion as it pertains to the regulation greenhouse gases from biomass power plants. Once again, green groups are using the courts to dictate the pace of the EPA’s climate policies.

[click to continue…]