Coal-Fired Power Plants to Face Choice: Scrub It or Shut It

Otherwise stymied by a Congress that declines to act, President Obama said in June of last year that he would deploy every tool in the executive branch’s authority to reduce power plant emissions. Announcement of the rules that the Environmental Protection Agency has long been toiling to develop is imminent.

The agency had the difficult job of concocting just the right recipe between not too fiery and not too bland. Too mild, in the hopes of avoiding legal
challenges, and the regulations will do little good. Too harsh runs the risk that the cost of retro-fitting “scrubbers” to old coal-burning plants will cause utilities simply to shutter them, with the risk of the nation generating too little power, leading to blackouts in peak-use periods.

Accordingly, the EPA is expected to offer a menu of choices to the states. They will be responsible for enacting the changes owing to EPA basing its actions on a section of the Clean Air Act that hands enforcement to states. Following the recommendation of the Natural Resources Defense Council that each state should be free to develop its own plan, EPA chief Gina McCarthy has said that states should follow ways “that make sense for them”. China is polluting our West: May 15: We buy their goods and China sends to our western states the pollution of the plants that manufacture them, says a report from the National Academy of Sciences.
    

That means permitted compliance measures will go beyond power plant fixes to likely embrace a mix of wind, solar, efficiency measures and even state or regional markets for trading pollution permits commonly called “cap-and-trade” such as the program already in use in ever-pioneering California.

Whatever the EPA comes up with, years of law suits will follow, brought by the states and industry. As a way to thwart the EPA they may challenge that very flexibility that the agency may offer to states. There’s the question, for example, whether the EPA is limited only to prescribing technological fixes and has no authority to allow schemes such as cap-and-trade as remedies. Republicans and Democrats alike, who come from either those states that mine coal or still have coal-fired plants, will protest the
Coal trains form up in the giant western yards
rules. The standard Republican position is aligned with industry and warns that energy costs will rise to harm the poor and middle class. They call the government’s campaign a “war on coal” and a “job-killer”. Those claims assume, however, that the prevalent industry reaction will be to shut down coal-burning plants rather than retrofit (which would create jobs). Which way the power industry chooses to respond is yet to be known.

Challenges will come from the states most affected, such as Ohio, with 78% of its power coming from burning coal, and Indiana (83%) and Kentucky (93%). A group of twelve states in the Supreme Court case filed a brief calling the EPA’s permit rule “one of the most brazen power grabs ever attempted by an administrative agency”. The American Energy Alliance, partly funded by Koch Industries, owned by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, intends to roll out attack ads for television and radio when the EPA issues the rules for existing power plants.

courts support clean-up

Obama’s plan got major assists from a cascade of court decisions in April.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-2 that the Environmental Protection Agency can impose its Cross-State Air Pollution Rule on 28 Midwestern
and Appalachian states whose energy industry fouls the air of downwind Northeastern states.

Eastern states have long been subjected to stricter rules brought about by pollution riding in on the winds from states further west. Those states have lenient rules because they are cleansed by those same prevailing winds from the west that send soot and carbon east. East Coast states have been angered for years at neighboring states for continuing to foul the air they breath.

Just prior to the Supreme Court decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the nation’s new standards curtailing emissions of mercury and other pollutants. And a federal district court ordered the EPA to come up with a nationwide regulation to rein in smog caused by coal-fired power plants and other sources.

Yet another case before the Supreme Court, involving pollution-control requirements for refineries, steel mills, chemical and cement plants when they undergo expansion, awaits decision in June.

global warming? Yes, but…

Just as the Affordable Care Act is a culmination of decades-long government aspirations to impose a healthcare system on the United States, whatever the EPA announces in June will culminate a decades-long battle to get the power industry to clean up its act. Certainly, the President will count the EPA restrictions as adding to his scorecard in combatting global warming. That scorecard already boasts auto emission standards required to raise efficiency to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, as well as standards for trucks and buses. A year ago at Georgetown University he said, “I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing.” Plus,
he signed a United Nations accord pledging that the United States will cut its greenhouse gas emissions 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 and 83% by 2050. “There is simply no way to hit those targets…other than by going after cars and coal.”

It is incorrect, though, to view measures to clamp down on power plant emissions as simply an Obama pet project targeting climate change. It is a struggle that dates from before climate became a major concern. The issue has always been health. For decades the power industry has been free to pollute the atmosphere at little penalty whereas the EPA estimates — in what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called a “voluminous record” of thousands of correlations between upwind emissions and downwind effects — that the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule would prevent up to “34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 nonfatal heart attacks, 19,000 cases of acute bronchitis, 400,000 cases of aggravated asthma and 1.8 million sick days a year”.

long time coming

The Clean Air Act was signed into law by Richard Nixon forty-four years ago. Industry has been fighting it ever since. Soon after enactment, its rules for energy companies were relaxed, requiring them 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” so as to evade installing pollution control scrubbers. The Reagan administration was 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 a secret meeting (that excluded any environmental representatives) to set energy policy. One outcome was that the lawsuits were dropped. Another was relaxation of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide rules (doing so was called by the courts in 2008 to be a violation of the Clean Air Act). The energy companies had been some of the biggest Bush campaign contributors.

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.

scope

The long march to curb power plant pollution gets little public notice. Instead, it is the enduring grassroots campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline that grabs the headlines; it has become a symbol, the fork that will say which road the the U.S. will take regarding global warming. But despite NASA’s James Hansen saying that the burning of all of the Alberta tar sands will be “game over” in the climate change battle, the quantity of dirty oil moving through the pipeline doesn’t measure up compared to what EPA regulations could accomplish.

A New York Times energy report said the pipeline would add “18.7 million more metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere annually than would be produced by conventional oil”. In contrast, given that almost 40% of American electricity production is by coal-fired power plants, the coming EPA rules could — depending on their stringency — erase from the atmosphere 200 to 500 metric tons of carbon pollution annually. Add to that the auto standards of Obama’s first term, which are slated to cut about 180 million tons of carbon a year by 2020, rising to 580 million tons by 2030 says the EPA. And then there is the reduction of 350 million tons of carbon that building and appliance efficiency regulations account for. The real game changer could be the EPA’s next step.

but then there’s china

Beyond cleaner air and less health problems, what good does all this do? Coal is expected to top oil as the world’s dominant fuel source as early as 2020 thanks to China, which will provide two-thirds of the growth in global usage. With the boom in natural gas eating away at its domestic business and new power generation restrictions on the way, American coal operators will help make that happen. Exporters want to build four new terminals — two each in Washington and Oregon — to ship 130 million tons of coal a year to China and elsewhere. Mined in the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, the source of more than 40% of America’s coal, the companies extract that coal from federal lands for which the government charges less than market rates — that is, to the extent that it collects at all. We will find ourselves subsidizing China. The coastal states are aghast at the prospect of 18 lumbering trains a day chugging through their state to just the largest facility, the planned Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point. We may stem burning it here but they’ll burn it there.

Even so, not until the United States undertakes serious policy measures to cut back pollution at home can we begin to preach to the rest of the world to do the same.

In Congress, It’s More than the “Appearance of Corruption”

The Supreme Court believes that the existence of corruption in the federal government is overblown and in a second case recently (first Citizens United, now McCutcheon) has lifted the sluice gates to allow virtually unlimited amounts of
money to flow into elections.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his Citizens United opinion that the government’s interest in the influence ofmoney is “limited to quid pro quo corruption”. In a subsequent case, the Court’s majority opinion found that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption”.

How about actual corruption?

A piece on “60 Minutes” recently dealt with just one form of congressional corruption, but it was enough to show that Kennedy has been sequestered too long in that black-robed society and that has led him to believe that simply because contributors “may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt”.

Campaign funds cannot be converted to personal use by those running for office. That’s banned by the Ethics Reform Act of 1989. But to go around that barrier, members of Congress soon thereafter devised the “Leadership PAC” — an unrestricted fund that members are free to set up individually to take in money that they can spend on anything they choose.

“60 Minutes” cited Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss spending more than $100,000 in just two years playing golf at the world’s finest courses. For New York congressman Gregory Meeks, it’s football — $35,000 on NFL games. More famously, in 2006, when North Carolina senator and presidential candidate John Edwards gave his mistress $114,000 to make a campaign video, that came from his leadership PAC.

These and other examples came from Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the Hoover Institution whose work we have already heralded in “Privy to Policy Secrets, Congress Trades on Insider Information”. Investigation by his team of researchers says hundreds of millions of dollars in political contributions have poured into these personal slush funds, with the money coming largely from lobbyists and special interest groups. You don’t need to be a leader to have a leadership PAC. Nearly every congressman and senator has one.

There is no movement afoot to eliminate this corruption. In 2011, Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana had a go at it with a bill that would at least have prohibited his colleagues from hiring family members with with campaign funds or leadership PAC dollars. He got not a single co-sponsor. His fellow members like the arrangement just as it is and judging from those that “60 Minutes” interviewed (confronted is the better word, as most tried to duck), they have long since persuaded themselves that they are deserving of these lavish expense accounts.

These are contributions that are not intended for the travel and television spots a candidate needs to get elected or for an incumbent to return to office. They are outright personal gifts. Yet Justice Kennedy apparently believes there is no quid pro quo — that nothing is expected in return — when a donor pays for the personal pleasures of a member of Congress.

Kennedy should listen to Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard professor who described in a TED talk given a year ago the money raising process in Congress where they:

“spend between 30% and 70% of their time raising money to get back to Congress…and the question we need to ask is, what does it do to them, these humans, as they spend their time behind the telephone, calling people they’ve never met…As they do this, they develop a sixth sense, a constant awareness about how what they do might affect their ability to raise money…They constantly adjust their views”

Lessig campaigns hard for campaign finance reform and has just created a counter-PAC to “kickstart fundamental reform by reducing the influence of money in politics”. The goal for 2014 is to identify and back candidates

committed to fundamental reform in five congressional races, and to expand from there in the 2016 elections. His specifically targeted action, as opposed to the generalized goals of most political advocacy organizations, seems to have tapped a pent-up desire of citizens to see something actually done. Lessig’s campaign called MayDayPAC, aimed to raise $1 million in May (which will be matched, says the promotion). By 13 days into the month the fund had already passed the million mark. In June the stakes rise to $5 million (which also will be matched). Uniquely, none of the money will actually be collected from donors’ credit cards unless the entire pledge goal is reached by July 1.

If you’d like to play a part in getting corruptive money out of politics, click the graphic above.

Honoring the Troops

The tragic Vietnam war sparked a decade of protests. The flower children stuck the stems down the barrels of National Guard rifles and chanted “Make peace not war”, but then cme the student killings at Kent State and riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Our troops, for the most part unwilling and drafted, saw 58,000 of their fellow Americans die in that war, yet when they came home from that hell, they were greeted at airports with animosity and contempt by the peaceniks, as if it was the fault of the young who had been sent to war by the old. It was disgraceful.

How did we get that so wrong?

This time we got it right. Americans have been unfailing in support of the troops themselves, but the government — as it always does after wars — has again failed our troops, this time by the depraved conduct of the Veterans Administration.

We the people need continually to remember the tens of thousands who have come home damaged and maimed with their lives ever after affected by these wars. True support of the troops means donate, now and every year, to the organizations who are helping the vets and their families. Here’s a favorite of ours: .

Solar Is Gaining, But Not If Big Carbon Has Any Say

The cost of solar panels has fallen to a level that the federal subsidies that propped up the industry while it developed efficiencies may no longer be needed.

Still, only 1% of power company customers have installed solar. But that’s too much for the utilities that produce power from fossil fuels. They want to crush the upstart industry before it makes any further headway. By free market competition? By innovation, say, or lowering prices? Why, no. Instead, the power generating companies have gone to the legislatures in state after state to have special laws enacted which aim to tax solar out of existence.

Leading their cause is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the outfit funded by corporations, the utilities and — there they are, again — the Koch brothers, who own energy conglomerate Koch Industries. ALEC is the organization that writes “model” laws for Republican-controlled legislatures to enact. They are also behind many of the laws states have adopted to mandate voter ID and make it otherwise more difficult for certain targeted blocs to vote. We wrote about ALEC two years ago in “Who’s Writing the Laws in Your State?”.

Altogether 43 states have laws on their books that require their public utilities to buy power generated by homes and businesses that have made the heretofore costly investment in solar arrays on their rooftops. Whatever the arrays generate that is not used at the sites is fed back through the power line to the utility, effectively spinning the meter in reverse. The arrangement is called net-metering. In most of those states, this is part of a program to replace some of fossil fuel use with renewables. There are 29 states shooting for reductions of 10% or more by various dates.

ALEC also works to overturn these renewable mandates. The organization is working to overturn Ohio’s 12.5% mandate, for example. In Kansas, where Kathleen Sebelius, when she was governor, signed the first instance in the U.S. of a government agency blocking the building of coal-fired power plants on the grounds of CO2 emissions, that state’s senate repealed Kansas’s mandate to reduce emissions by 20%. It would have gone through had the state’s House not blocked the measure.

getting even

Wind and solar posed no problem to the energy producers as long as these renewable programs were rounding errors. Power plants tolerated them as a way to dampen demand and avoid building costly new power plants. Many companies even gave customers free low-powered CFL bulbs to reduce consumption. But now that solar is poised to grow, well, they can’t let that get out of hand.

The weapon of choice is a surcharge, or a tax, on solar owners. Oklahoma’s House of Representatives just passed by an 83-5 vote a surcharge for anyone who henceforward installs solar or a small wind turbine. Arizona Public Service, backed by secret donors and business groups, one of which had earlier report bankrolling in the millions by the Kochs, got the legislature in that state to allow charging a whopping $50 to $100 monthly fee on net-metering customers. Net-metering is not big business for consumers; a fee that size is enough to dissuade homeowners from installing solar, which is the idea.

The practice is spreading; moves to penalize utility customers are afoot from Washington to both Carolinas. One claim is that the utilities must charge more to their other customers to compensate for the net-metering credits issued to those selling them solar power. A television commercial in Arizona said older people on fixed incomes were hurt by higher rates. But, excepting California, where utilities must credit customers at the retail rate, utilities elsewhere credit only the wholesale cost, which leaves the electrical companies reselling the power at retail with no cost of generating it.

The other argument is that customers generating their own power are not paying their share of the power company’s infrastructure — transmission lines, substations, etc. — which they use when the clouds roll in. It is a strange argument to say that, if you have bought equipment to generate your own electricity, you owe money to the public utility whose electricity you are not using when the sun is shining, even though you do pay for the utility’s electricity (and infrastructure built into the price) when the clouds roll past or night descends.

Another argument is that the surcharge is needed to recover the cost of the infrastructure for sending electricity back to the electric company. If so, that justifies a one-time fee, not an unending charge every month.

forward into the past

The real point is elsewhere. The nation has decided on the long term development of alternative sources of energy both for the abatement of fossil fuel use and as a means to combat climate change. Solar offers enormous potential — in place of plants belching soot and planet-harming gasses, the prospect of a hundred million American rooftops someday capturing the inexhaustible power of the Sun. To the troglodytes who refuse to acknowledge that man’s unearthing and burning of sequestered oil, gas and coal in quantities measured in gigatons could possibly be having an effect on the atmosphere, we can only ask, don’t you consider the consequences if you are wrong? Because failure to follow the precautionary path that leads to damage to the planet will be irreversible.

What explains the mentality of those possessed of so much obstinacy, such lack of foresight, such unconcern for those who will live their lives after they are gone, such towering greed as to care only for their own profit as to want to destroy the hard won gains of renewables and insist that we stay stranded in the past?

Congress Votes a Cut in the Minimum Wage