InsideClimate News - John H. Cushman Jr.
By redefining the 'best system' to control climate pollution from power plants, EPA is reversing course to boost coal at the expense of people and planet.
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The Clean Power Plan replacement proposed by the Trump
administration is tailored to favor the coal industry. Compared to the
Obama-era plan, it would increase both greenhouse gas emissions and
health-damaging pollution. Credit: Dominick Reuter/AFP/Getty Images
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The Trump administration has proposed to replace the nation's
landmark climate regulations with a watered-down version that would do
next to nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and
wouldn't even set a specific national goal.
If the new plan survives legal challenges, it would fulfill a
campaign pledge to abort the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. And in
combination with the
freezing of automotive emissions standards announced a few weeks ago, it would gut any attempt to achieve through federal regulations the goals of the
Paris climate agreement, which the Trump administration has also renounced.
Given that the new rule does not challenge the
finding that greenhouse gas pollution from coal-fired power plants causes global warming and endangers people and the planet, nor
court rulings
that the Clean Air Act requires the Environmental Protection Agency to
bring it under control, the proposal is breathtaking in its embrace of
apathy.
It would turn over to states the main responsibility of deciding how,
or even whether, to reduce emissions, but it would allow them basically
only one tool—encouraging power plants to make their use of coal more
efficiently, burning less fuel per kilowatt-hour of power sent to the
grid. Any upgrades would be plant by plant and boiler by boiler.
In contrast, the Obama regulations, which were
waylaid by litigation
and never took effect, would have comprehensively reshaped the power
grid itself and steered it away from coal, while giving the states broad
leeway in the use of flexible, system-wide approaches to achieve the
transition to cleaner energy—a process that was already underway.
The Trump regulations are tailored in favor of coal, not the climate. The words "climate" and "
climate change" barely even occurs in the
hundreds of pages released on Tuesday for 60 days of public comment. The regulations were ushered in by Scott Pruitt, the
disgraced former EPA chief
who had joined legal challenges to the Obama plan as Oklahoma's state
attorney general before coming to Washington with Trump; along with
Andrew Wheeler, the former coal lobbyist who has taken Pruitt's place,
and
Bill Wehrum, formerly a fossil fuel industry lawyer and now head of the EPA's office of air quality.
To turn the existing regulations upside down, favoring coal at the cost of climate, they had to perform five feats.
The newly published rule narrows the vision of how best to control
emissions. It accepts that the regulations might let emission reductions
falter. It provides a loophole for increases in other forms of deadly
pollution. It also reinvents the math used to calculate the costs and
benefits of its approach.
'Best System'
The core task facing the EPA under the section of the Clean Air Act
that would control carbon dioxide emission controls at large stationary
sources like power plants is to define the "best system of emission
reduction" that has been "adequately demonstrated."
Under Obama, the agency adopted a far-reaching, system-wide approach
that allowed emissions trading, efficiency upgrades, fuel substitution
and other approaches widely used on the interconnected grid. Inevitably,
this accelerated the transition from coal that market forces and other
regulations had already set in motion.
The coal industry and coal-heavy states objected, saying the federal
government was over-reaching, and they sued to limit any regulations to
the individual boilers and smokestacks where coal is burned, known as
"inside the fence."
EPA's choice of boiler efficiency as the "best system" gives the coal
industry exactly the change it sought in court. (For now, the
litigation remains in limbo.)
The rollback, while undoing most of what Obama sought, is meant to
give some coal plants a new lease on life, limiting the regulatory
damage to the dirtiest of fuels—if not to the climate.
Emissions Trends
Although it's hard to predict future emissions amid the shifting
trends of economics and technology, it's clear that the Trump proposal
would slow the improvement.
Under every
scenario
the agency examined, this plan would fall short of the carbon dioxide
emissions reductions expected under Obama's plan—by about 3 percent in
the 2030s.
New Pollution Rules
Aside from the greenhouse gas emissions' impacts on global warming,
this plan is also projected to increase other kinds of pollution, such
as smog and sooty particles that make people sick and can even kill.
Why would cutting carbon emissions from a plant increase other
pollution? Because EPA is only allowing one fix, the more efficient use
of coal. If that makes a plant's electricity cheaper, the power company
will sell more to the grid. And as the plant meets this increased
demand,
it will give off more of all kinds of pollution.
Under the Clean Air Act, a plant that is modernized in a way that
increases its smoke and fumes has to apply for "new source" permits, and
usually has to upgrade pollution controls across the board. That could
make the whole project unaffordable, and the industry has been trying
hard to undo this requirement.
Now the Trump administration has decided, in a highly controversial
move, to build into its new climate regulations a loophole for these
other pollutants. By inserting a change to the new source permitting
rule into this climate regulation, it gives up one of the most valuable
co-benefits of climate regulations—extra protections for public health.
Calculating Social Costs
All this extra pollution comes with high costs to society.
For starters, the Trump administration calculates that by 2035 as
many as 1,400 more people will die every year from the changes being
proposed.
As in every environmental regulation, it is complicated to add up all
the costs and benefits in dollar terms and compare them to test whether
the rules are worthwhile. Here, the Trump administration has taken
several steps to make its approach seem worthier.
For example, it counts only the climate benefits to the United
States, not worldwide. And it includes steep discounts in the value of
future benefits when translating them into today's dollars, a
calculation known as the "social cost of carbon."
Despite these manipulations, the Trump EPA's analysis shows that this rule, compared to the Clean Power Plan,
sacrifices both climate and health benefits.
State Roles
All these calculations are blurred by a key decision embedded in the new approach as a matter of ideology rather than law.
Usually, as in the Obama plan, the key objectives in Clean Air Act
regulations are set by the federal agency, which then turns to the
states to manage the details of compliance. This time, it is being left
entirely to the states to set emissions targets, and even to decide the
stringency of the one approach the EPA is telling them to
use—improvements to the efficiency of coal combustion.
There is no floor being set on the effectiveness of emissions
controls. Instead, while giving the states no flexibility in the "best
system" for reductions, Trump gives them free rein to do practically
nothing.
For states that are eager to reduce their emissions—and there are
many of them, including the cap-and-trade schemes of California and the
Northeastern members of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative—the
administration merely seeks comments on how to mesh the various
approaches.
Instead, some states, and even some utilities, will join forces with environmental advocates and sue.
The Prognosis
This proposal, after 60 days of comments that may lead to some revisions,
will certainly be challenged in court.
The question of how the Clean Air Act ultimately will address the
climate crisis will, in the end, come before the Supreme Court, tilted
in a new conservative direction by Trump's appointees.
Even without any legal delays, however, this rule would not take
effect until well after the end of Trump's term in 2020. In the
meantime, continuing emissions of carbon dioxide from the nation's power
plants will follow the whims of the marketplace, consumer and business
choices, state and other federal regulations, the economy's rising and
falling tides and the emergence of new, cheaper, cleaner technologies.
The decades-long struggle to bring the Clean Air Act to bear of the problem is far from over.
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