EPA admits banning coal plants won’t impact global warming
More Senate Keystone pipeline backers oppose debt-ceiling link
Global Warming on Free Republic
Posted on 09/24/2013 7:44:34 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Environmental Protection Agency’s recently announced decision to, in effect, ban the construction of traditional coal-fired power plants in the United States is a non-solution to a hypothetical problem, enacted upon a legal basis that is shaky and an economic basis that is nonexistent. The cost-benefit analysis is almost entirely one-sided: The costs will be very high, and the benefits the EPA hopes to secure will remain out of reach.
The EPA is demanding that new U.S. plants that will use coal to generate electricity must meet standards that today are met by no commercial coal-fired plant operating anywhere in the world. There are, however, two plants coming on line — one in Saskatchewan, one in Mississippi — that incorporate new technology designed to capture enough carbon dioxide to satisfy the EPA demands. Whether that new technology will be effective in practice remains to be seen; whether it will be both effective and cost-effective is a much more important and complex question, one that the EPA has no genuine interest in contemplating.
That is a problem, inasmuch as the Clean Air Act requires that the EPA perform a cost-benefit analysis of new rules. EPA administrator Gina McCarthy not only says that the agency has conducted such an analysis but goes on to characterize it as “wonderful,” and we are indeed filled with a sense of wonder at her proclamation, though perhaps not in the way she intended.
The costs remain a mystery. The industry expects them to be high, but how high is anybody’s guess: The CO2-capture technology that the EPA expects to become standard as a result of its new mandate is, as noted, not currently in commercial use. There is no demand in the market for it, and its costs can therefore be estimated on a wild-guess basis at best.
It is easier to estimate the benefits: They will be nonexistent. Even if we assume that the general thrust of the case for anthropogenic global warming is accurate (an assumption that requires setting aside the recent failure of climate-change models and the less confident scientific consensus as to the meaning of recent data), the fact remains that global warming is, if it is anything at all, global. Local controls on U.S. power plants, even if they are draconian, will have little impact on the overall atmospheric composition of the planet and its effect on global temperatures.
Carbon dioxide is only one greenhouse gas among many, and the United States is not the world’s largest producer of it. The United States, in fact, produces about 15 percent of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions, and U.S. power plants are responsible only for about 33 percent of that 15 percent. And the new rule applies only to newly constructed plants, though the EPA has signaled that it intends to demand the retrofitting of existing plants in the future.
What all this means is that even if the EPA were wildly successful in its implementation of the new standards, it still would not achieve any substantial reduction in global greenhouse-gas emissions. It is equally likely, if not more, that it will achieve an increase instead: Being a fungible commodity, the coal not consumed by U.S. generators will find its way to China, India, and the rest of the developing world, where it will be consumed in high-pollution plants that make those in the United States look as pure as vestal virgins by comparison.
So: Costs unknown, benefits negligible. “Wonderful,” indeed.
No doubt surviving members of the 88th Congress, which passed the Clean Air Act, are filled with a similar sense of wonder that their law is being used to police carbon dioxide emissions, an outcome the legislators did not intend. The legal basis for declaring carbon dioxide a “pollutant” under the act is questionable at best, as is the EPA’s rationale for picking and choosing what sorts of emitters will be subject to its new rules. If you would like a preview of what medicine is going to look like under Obamacare, consider the high-handed, letter-of-the-law-be-damned approach of the EPA and the courts that have enabled it.
The new rule may prove wonderful for the manufacturers of the capture technology that will effectively be mandated. As with the case of Solyndra et al., this maneuver is not about producing environmental benefits but about creating markets for politically favored firms and industries. But even those cronies may fare less well than they expect to.
The Obama administration, despite its obvious desire, has not yet been successful in strangling the natural-gas renaissance that is changing the face of the American energy industry. Though coal remains the largest single source of electricity, it already has been falling out of favor with those building new generating capacity, because natural gas is cheaper and plentiful. It is also less damaging to the environment, contra the ill-informed hysteria about the gas-extraction technique known as fracking. But the United States has a complex economy, and there is no single “right” source for fuel. Left to its own devices, the industry probably will move toward natural gas and away from coal, but coal will remain an important part of the picture for the foreseeable future.
In 2012, Barack Obama became the first major-party presidential candidate since statehood to fail to win in a single county of West Virginia. He lost the statewide vote by a substantial margin, with two out of three against him. The people of West Virginia rightly appreciated that their best-known commodity is the target of a regulatory jihad by the White House that has no environmental or economic justification.
The real motive here is the administration’s messianic pretentions, its belief that its bureaucrats and managers are more humane and more intelligent than the producers and consumers over whom they reign, and that they have been chosen to lead the United States into a future that is relatively free of such relics of the Industrial Revolution as coal-fired power plants and petroleum products. Unhappily for them, there is a wide gulf between social engineering and real engineering, and the most impressive products the green-energy revolution has delivered so far are a couple of nifty electric motorcycles — which are recharged by a power grid that gets 40 percent of its juice from coal.
A functioning modern society requires reliable electricity. A modern industrial economy requires affordable electricity. To impose incalculable costs on electricity generation in exchange for ideological satisfaction with no real-world environmental benefit is the sign of an agency that has put its own political agenda ahead of the national interest, playing fast and loose with the law in the process. The EPA is a menace, and Congress should put it on a leash.
Only in the Alice-in-Wonderland universe called the Obama administration can this be possible, considering...
"We are the Saudi Arabia of coal. We've got more coal than just about anybody else.
This is America. We figured out how to put a man on the moon in ten years. You can't tell me we can't figure out how to burn coal, that we mine right here in the United States of America, and make it work. We can do that."
Barrack Obama--- 2005?
This administration has aligned itself with “developing” countries whose main aim is giving tremendous advantage to those countries by burdening developed nations. Climate control is subterfuge. They argue that we had a head start, so the developing countries need exemptions from any burdens while having essentially free access to the latest technologies. It is possible to have a totally emission free coal fired power plant using CO2 sequestration amongst other expensive technologies, the costs would be enormous and this administration’s aim is to impose those costs on the US.
High cost gov regulations that actually make the carbon emissions worse overall? Sounds just like the ethanol.
It’s possible. Not practical in any way. I worked for a company that was developing the technologies, at great expense. This administration will force the US to scale up the technologies or not burn coal in new plants, the net effect is simply driving up US electric rates to help us be uncompetitive with the world.
How soon will the export of coal be banned? All in the name of gaia. Another gazillion dollars up in smoke for no measurable results. Don’t ya just love tossing away money. So easy a caveman could do it.
In the 70’s the Dept of Energy constructed a Breeder Reactor to test their theories. They were able to take spent uranium to produce power to dispose of it, as well as useful medical isotopes.
It worked so well they shut it down and dismantled it in favor of long term deep isolated storage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Flux_Test_Facility
Probably the only successful DOE R&D project to provide benefits to a commercial operations and the public as opposed to the current EPA plan of writing pie in the sky regulations without any supporting technology to demonstrate that they actually work can be implemented by the public. Now all they say is in the future when this technology is developed...
So the lights go out in eastern South Carolina because some jerk (who became president by other jerks) believed Al Gore?
If we believe it's not possible and keep repeating it... it's really not possible.
Just 20 years ago, it was not possible for a compact car to get 45 mpg, and midsize cars 35mpg.
It just wasn't possible.
In an unrestrained free market, anything is possible.Consider this, as a contradiction of Obama's statement...
There was a team of Obama people speaking to Mr. C. (engineer, automotive experience of 40+ years, and Chairman of CAR). They were explaining to Mr. C. that the auto companies needed to make a car that was electric and liquid natural gas (LNG) with enough combined fuel to go 500 miles so we wouldn't "need" so many gas stations (a whole other topic). They were quoting BTUs of LNG and battery life that they had looked up on some website.
Mr. C. explained that to do this you would need a TRUNK FULL of batteries and a LNG tank as big as the car to make that happen, and that there were problems related to the laws of physics that prevented them from...
The Obama person interrupted and said (and I am quoting here):
"These laws of physics? Whose rules are those? We need to change that."
(Some of the others wrote down the law so they could look it up later.)
"We have the congress and administration. We can repeal that law, amend it, or use an executive order to get rid of that problem. That's why we are here, to fix these sort of issues."
.......And these are the people who are going to fix healthcare.
Let the COAL WARS begin!
Take these idiots to court. That decision calling carbon dioxide a pollutant must be reversed.
The US Supreme court already did, CO2 is a pollutant, a supreme court decision, (I don't have the number). So what the trees and plants breath in, what we breath out is a pollutant!! Another example of logic from liberals.
EPA admits banning coal plants won’t impact global warming
More Senate Keystone pipeline backers oppose debt-ceiling link
Global Warming on Free Republic
I disagree. This is about centralized power and control and the further enfebblement of the America citizen to foster governmental dependency. These goals are attainable and Obama has already been all too successful in changing the US into Obamastan.
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