Last week the ongoing story of climate change offered us poor humans a slight glimmer of hope in the form of a bureaucratic action by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It also highlighted the ongoing battle between climate activists allied to the Obama administration and the various industrial interests aligned against them to chart the course of America’s energy future.
Issued this past Friday, the EPA’s ruling on coal emissions has been long in coming. It comes after a four-year fight in the nation’s courts that ended with the Supreme Court ruling in 2007 that the EPA could regulate carbon as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Under the conservative Bush administration, however, CO2 regulation was going nowhere, even if the EPA had the right to do it.
After Barack Obama won the White House in 2008, expectations were high that the EPA, now under a Democrat, might make a move, but the new Democratic administration put carbon regulation on the political backburner while the White House dealt with a collapsing economy. It also hoped, forlornly as it turned out, that Congressional Republicans might negotiate a cap-and-trade program with the White House that would forego the need to use the EPA’s blunt regulatory power to combat climate change.
Republicans, however, doubled down on being intransigent and commenced with an unprecedented program of partisan obstructionism aimed at making Obama a one-term president. Not willing to risk alienating voters and coal-state Democrats during a weak economic recovery and with a resurgent GOP hounding the president at every turn after the 2010 mid-term elections, the Obama EPA held off on regulating coal, ostensibly for Congress to act but in reality for a safer political climate to develop so as to give cover for any administration move on carbon regulation.
Tough standards?
The thumping defeat the GOP suffered at the hands of President Obama and the Democratic Party in the 2012 elections provided that cover, and finally the EPA has been allowed to move forward on regulating carbon in all its forms, including coal. Friday’s ruling by the EPA will therefore strictly regulate the carbon emissions that new power plants will be allowed to emit. A victory for climate activists, then, but as it turns out, a bit of a hollow one.
Currently, existing plants – even the most efficient – emit some 1,700 pounds of carbon dioxide for every megawatt hour of power produced. Under the new rule, only 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emitted per megawatt hour will be allowed – a 41 percent reduction. Even with advanced, though terribly expensive, carbon-capture technology that is still in the research and development phase, this will be a very tough standard to meet.
Effectively, the EPA is saying that no new coal plants will be built in the United States if the EPA’s dictate can sustain legal challenges and shifting political winds. Still, as with any bureaucratic ruling, there are loopholes through which one could melt a glacier, and closing these loopholes represents the next stage in the battle to regulate carbon emitted inside the United States.
First, the ruling still leaves in place existing coal power plants – which have long been grandfathered into increasingly stricter regulatory regimes put forth by the EPA. While politically expedient, this has long had the perverse effect of keeping in operation many older, dirtier power plants. Next year, if all goes well, the EPA is planning to put in place for the first time carbon emission rules on existing power plants. That, needless to say, is going to be an epic fight in Washington when it comes.
Second, while the ruling is all but making it impossible for new coal-fired power plants to be built, this is less important than it may seem due to the changing economics of power generation. While coal is inexpensive and abundant, natural gas – a much cleaner fuel in terms of CO2 production – has gotten nearly as cheap and abundant due to the shale gas revolution wrought by hydraulic fracturing. Furthermore, even though the EPA’s new ruling on CO2 emissions also apply to gas-fired plants, though at a slightly higher level than coal, current gas-turbine plants already meet the new standard – giving utilities an added incentive to switch from coal to gas.
On their own, utilities are already doing this for financial reasons, so the net effect the new ruling will have on U.S. carbon emissions is effectively zero – at least until the rules on CO2 emissions for existing power plants are hashed out, in theory, next year. The ruling thus bans plants that industry doesn’t want to build anyway, while doing little to tighten the regulatory screws on natural gas – which, for all its touted cleanliness, still emits a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The beat of Mother Nature’s drum
Moreover, all this “progress” on coal and carbon could still be pushed back if the conservative Supreme Court moves to lessen the EPA’s writ on coal or, as likely, Republicans gain the White House or the Senate. What’s more, it still does not establish a national plan – either a carbon-emission trading scheme or carbon tax – aimed at reducing emissions even further. Indeed, as reported by the New York Times, when the EPA does plan to introduce emission regulations for existing sources of CO2 next year, it will do so under a section of the Clean Air Act that gives states tremendous leeway in implementation.
So, what will likely happen after next year’s ruling goes into effect is a situation where states concerned about climate change will push ahead on transitioning to renewable, green energy systems while states that are less concerned will be allowed to lag behind under existing rules. CO2 will therefore be reduced going forward – probably significantly – but not nearly as much as might have been the case if a national carbon-reduction plan had been put in place.
The United States as a whole will therefore not become a second Germany, whose Energiewende has been making progress in weaning Europe’s industrial powerhouse off of both dirty, CO2-intensive power plants and nuclear power, though parts of the U.S., like green California, Oregon, and Washington state, may do so. This is disappointing, but given our fractious, polarized politics and the very limited power of the federal government to enact far-reaching change swiftly, this is probably the best that can be expected out of Washington on the climate change front.
Will this be enough, at least for the time being? Politically, probably, but the Earth and its climate system marches to the beat of a different drummer, and what is politically expedient in our nation’s capital does not matter much to Mother Nature. With the latest assessment report about to be released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we’ll soon find out just how much more synchronized our political and atmospheric drum beats will have to become in the future.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News’ editorial policy.