environment

Finally, a Ruling in Long Fight Against Power Industry

Allowed for decades to pollute your air Dec 27 2011

When President Obama surprisingly gave the go-ahead to Environmental Protection Agency chief, Lisa Jackson, to announce new rules restricting mercury and other heavy metal emissions from 600 U.S. power plants, it was at once a reversal of his blocking ozone controls in September that outraged environmentalists, and the outcome of a decades-long battle with the industry. We’ll look into the ruling’s likely fallout, but first a quick history:

The Clean Air Act is 41 years old. Immensely popular among the public, it was signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1970. Industry has been fighting it ever since.

Early on, the Act was relaxed, requiring energy companies to retrofit their plants with pollution controls only when significant modifications beyond “routine maintenance” were made. That was in deference to the great expense that immediate and unconditional replacement would have caused.

But the industry chafed under even this accommodation, referred to as “New Source Review”, often disguising major construction as “routine”. The Reagan administration was, of course, averse to regulation enforcement, so only in the Clinton years did the EPA take action against the industry’s subterfuge. It initiated investigations that led to lawsuits against 51 power plants for violating the Clean Air Act.

When George W. Bush took office, Vice President Dick Cheney huddled with energy executives in an infamously secret meeting (that excluded any environmental representatives) to set energy policy. One outcome was that the lawsuits were dropped. The energy companies had been some of the biggest Bush campaign contributors.

The Bush administration in 2005 set about revising sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide rules downward, but the courts in 2008 ruled the changes to be in violation of the Clean Air Act. Only now is the Obama administration putting the regulations back on track.

Stated simply, a large swath of the energy industry has successfully fought off the cost of installing pollution controls for decades to the detriment of the environment and public health. To dispute that, one would have to argue that coal is a clean fuel.

Plant closings and job losses? Some in the energy industry threaten that power shortages could be the result when a raft of companies elect to shutter older coal-fired plants deemed not worth the cost to retrofit with pollution controls. Many of these plants are a half-century old, inefficient and costly to operate and are on the verge of being decommissioned anyway — in fact, required to close under the court settlement with the Bush administration.

A newly emerging reason, as reported by the Wall Street Journal is that coal is losing out to “cheap and abundant natural gas…from shale-rock formations in the U.S.” Utilities are closing old coal-fired plants to switch to natural gas-fired plants — and they emit half the CO2 and a fraction of coal’s other pollutants.

The outcry comes from the coal industry in league with a rearguard of companies that have fought modernization as a way to squeeze the most from obsolete plants. The EPA expects costs to the consumer to rise by only 3%. That obscures the likelihood of much higher rates in those states served by the old-line plants that never modernized.

Republicans in Congress threaten legislation to block the EPA’s rules (the House has developed some forty-and-counting riders to bills that are meant to prevent the EPA from issuing any regulations). Here’s Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, the minority leader on the Environment and Public Works Committee, who vows legislation to overturn the ruling:

“This rule isn’t about public health. It is a thinly veiled electricity tax that continues the Obama administration’s war on affordable energy and is the latest in an unprecedented barrage of regulations that make up the EPA’s job-killing regulatory agenda”.

This pays no regard to the construction jobs that will be created to bring power plants into compliance. Scott Segal, of the trade group Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, claims a net job loss of 1.44 million, citing a study by a "very reputable economic consulting firm". To arrive at such a number requires the assumption that the lost spending power of a single furloughed employee from a power plant sets in motion a cascade of job losses elsewhere among people somehow entirely dependent on the original lost wages. John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council calls the study "notorious" and says it “just proves the adage that lobbyists can pay consultants to say anything in Washington.”

That the energy industry’s protests are not universal suggests that some prefer a final ruling to uncertainty. The CEO of one of the largest utilities, Public Service Enterprise Group, said the EPA rules — formulated over 20 years — are “long overdue”. Close to half the country’s more than 400 coal-burning plants have already outfitted emission controls in varying degrees and a third of the states already have set their own standards for mercury.

But if the new rules do hasten the shutdowns, that could result in closures before replacement power sources come on line. An industry report of November 2010 said that hundreds of coal, gas and oil-powered plants with a collective capacity of 70,000 megawatts could be shuttered if new rules were implemented too quickly. Segal argues, “it doesn't make sense to try and retire all of them simultaneously, and in so doing endanger about 8% of U.S. electricity. That's like taking three states offline”. The EPA counters, predicting much fewer plant closings (in a universe of 600 that the EPA says are affected, the “hundreds” in the industry report seems greatly exaggerated) and gives the industry five years to comply, with extensions when companies demonstrate why they need extra time.

breathing easier

The ruling is expected to reduce emissions of toxic substances by 90%, giving the EPA a strong claim to the health benefits it cites, notwithstanding Senator Inhofe’s counterclaims. The EPA estimates that the public will be spared 11,000 deaths and many more illnesses a year. Mercury is especially hazardous for women in their child-bearing years, for their fetuses when pregnant, and for children in general. Mercury emissions land in lakes and rivers and are taken up by the fish we eat, leading to potential neurological disorders and diminished IQs in children.

Whereas mercury is the element most cited in connection with the rule, the regulations will cut emissions of a suite of toxic substances:   EPA Administrator Jackson lists arsenic, cadmium, chromium, cyanide, hydrochloric acid and hydrofluoric acid.

The industry trade group disagrees, saying soot is the cause of the health problems, and that soot is already well-controlled. “The incremental health care benefits associated with this rule in our judgment are virtually zero”, says Segal.

The EPA estimates the annual cost of compliance at $10 billion a year compared with $100 billion in alleged costs of hospital visits and lost time on the job. It’s hard to know how such accuracy can be ascertained. But the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who stood with Ms Jackson when the intended rule was first announced, said, “If you think it’s expensive to put a scrubber on a smokestack, you should see how much it costs to treat a child over a lifetime with a birth defect”.

The President’s scorecard, compared with his campaign pronouncements, improves with this announcement. It comes in addition to July’s ruling — the inter-state rule — that limits sulfur dioxide emissions that the winds carry to other states — the so-called acid rain that settles in water bodies and destroys fish populations. That and the scheduled auto emission standards amount to a trifecta of winnings.

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