Coal is from Earth, Lisa Jackson is from mercury
JUNE 13, 2011
Link to Inhofe EPW Press Blog
President Obama’s jobs council will make its first recommendations today on lifting hiring and strengthening the economy. Too bad the message doesn’t seem to be reaching the Administration’s regulators, in particular the Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA is currently conducting a campaign against coal-fired power and one of its most destructive weapons is a pending regulation to limit mercury and other hazardous air pollutants like dioxins or acid gases that power plants emit. The 946-page rule mandates that utilities install “maximum achievable control technology” under the Clean Air Act-and even by the EPA’s lowball estimates, it is the most expensive rule in the agency’s history.
In 1990, Congress gave the EPA discretion to decide if mercury regulation is “necessary and appropriate,” and the Clinton Administration did so in its final days. The Bush Administration created a modest mercury program, only to have it overturned by an appeals court on technical grounds in its final days. The case was still in litigation when Mr. Obama took office, and his appointees used the opening to strafe the power industry, proposing a much more stringent rule.
The EPA issued the utility rule in March, with only 60 days for public comment. Basic administrative practice usually affords between 120 and 180 days, especially for complex or costly regulations of this scale. The proposal was obviously rushed, with numerous errors like overstating U.S. mercury emissions by a factor of 1,000. The word in Washington is that the openly politicized process unsettled even the EPA’s career staff.
The agency estimates that the utility rule will cost $10.9 billion annually but will yield as much as $140 billion in total health and environmental benefits. Sounds like a deal. But most of those alleged benefits are indirect-i.e., not from the mercury reductions that the rule is supposed to be for. Rather, they come from pollutants ("airborne particles") that the EPA already regulates under other parts of the Clean Air Act. A good analogy is a corporation double-counting revenue.
According to the EPA’s own numbers, every dollar in direct benefits costs $1,847. The reason is that electric generation-yes, even demon coal-results in negligible quantities of air pollutants like mercury. And mercury is on the decline: In 2005, the entire U.S. coal fleet emitted 26% less than the EPA predicted.
The real goal of the EPA’s rule is to shut down fossil fuel electric power in the name of climate change. The consensus estimate in the private sector is that the utility rule and eight others on the EPA docket will force the retirement of 60 out of the country’s current 340 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity. Reliability downgrades will hit the South and Midwest where coal energy is concentrated. American Electric Power recently announced that the rules will force it to shut down five plants in West Virginia and Ohio, a quarter of its coal fleet.
The power industry estimates that the true costs of the utility rule will far exceed the EPA estimates, which of course will be passed to consumers and businesses as higher prices. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, normally a White House union ally, says the rule will destroy 50,000 jobs and another 200,000 down the supply chain. That’s more jobs lost than if Boeing went bust.
Astonishingly, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson claimed in March that the utility rule is “expected to create jobs,” because it will “increase demand for pollution control technology” and “new workers will be needed to install, operate, and maintain” it. In other words, the government should harm an industry and force it to ruin working assets so maybe other people can clean up the mess.
Such theories help explain why the economic recovery and job creation are far weaker than they ought to be, but the good news is that even many Democrats are beginning to push back against the EPA’s willful damage. The least Congress can do is force the EPA to delay the final utility rule to allow for more public debate, though a better option would be to junk it.
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Similarly, Benny Peiser of GWPF in their weekly newsletter reports:
British industry’s ability to compete with companies overseas is under threat from punitive green energy costs, the new president of the CBI has told The Sunday Telegraph. Sir Roger Carr warns in an interview that the Coalition must give “some sort of support” over rising energy costs to UK manufacturers or else risk seeing businesses relocate abroad with the consequential loss of jobs. His comments - ahead of a CBI energy conference on Tuesday - come amid growing concern over the cost of renewable energy subsidies and so-called ‘green stealth taxes’. --The Sunday Telegraph, 12 June 2011
The CBI and Britain’s leading chemical firms have warned that the proposed UK “carbon floor” tax (unique in the world) will make our industry so uncompetitive that, unless the policy is changed, it will lead inevitably to mass plant closures and job losses. Similarly, the European Metals Association warned last week that the EU’s various “anti-carbon” policies are becoming so costly that they are already forcing steel, aluminium and other producers in their energy-intensive industry to relocate outside Europe, losing hundreds of thousands more jobs. Sooner or later, politicians must emerge with the sense and the courage to question this madness - as many other people are now beginning to do. But there is little sign of their emergence yet. --Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 12 June 2011
The Coalition’s obsession with climate change is damaging Britain’s recovery from recession, former Tory chancellor Nigel Lawson warns today. Writing in the Daily Mail, Lord Lawson delivers a scathing assessment of David Cameron’s so-called ‘green agenda’ and says it is ‘time this Government grew up’. Lord Lawson, one of the most respected Tory figures of recent decades, accuses the Prime Minister of risking Britain’s economy to make a ‘symbolic’ point. In a devastating verdict he writes: “The Government’s highly damaging decarbonisation policy, enshrined in the absurd Climate Change Act, does not have a leg to stand on. It is intended, at massive cost, to be symbolic: To make good David Cameron’s ambition to make his administration “the greenest government ever”. --Nigel Lawson, Daily Mail, 11 June 2011
By Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
Have you had a lot of fun watching the price of gasoline shoot out of sight this year at the pump? That will be just the appetizer. Thanks to new regulations from the Obama administration, power companies will shut down a significant number of coal-fired plants by 2014, and without any other reliable sources of mass-produced electricity, consumers will see their bills go up as much as 60% (via Instapundit and Newsalert): Consumers could see their electricity bills jump an estimated 40 to 60 percent in the next few years.
The reason: Pending environmental regulations will make coal-fired generating plants, which produce about half the nation’s electricity, more expensive to operate. Many are expected to be shuttered.
The increases are expected to begin to appear in 2014, and policymakers already are scrambling to find cheap and reliable alternative power sources. If they are unsuccessful, consumers can expect further increases as more expensive forms of generation take on a greater share of the electricity load.
You won’t just pay more to the utility company, either. The Chicago Tribune runs the math on public-sector cost increases in just their city:
What analysts know is that a portion of ComEd bills that pays electricity generators to reserve a portion of their power three years into the future will increase more than fourfold. That would translate into increases of $107 to $178 a year for an average residential customer in ComEd’s territory, starting in 2014, according to calculations by Chris Thomas, policy director for consumer advocacy group Citizens Utility Board.
In 2014 those so-called capacity costs are expected to add approximately $2.7 million over the previous year to electricity bills in Chicago Public Schools, $3.3 million for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District and $5.4 million to the city of Chicago, according to an analysis by Tenaska, aNebraska-based power development company that wants to develop a coal-fed power plant in central Illinois that would meet stringent regulations because it would capture and sequester emissions.
It’s the EPA gift that keeps on...taking.
On the other hand, we can consider this a rarity - an Obama promise kept:
Obama told the Chronicle:
The problem is not technical, uh, and the problem is not mastery of the legislative intricacies of Washington. The problem is, uh, can you get the American people to say, “This is really important,” and force their representatives to do the right thing? That requires mobilizing a citizenry. That requires them understanding what is at stake. Uh, and climate change is a great example.
You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know - Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it - whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.
They - you - you can already see what the arguments will be during the general election. People will say, “Ah, Obama and Al Gore, these folks, they’re going to destroy the economy, this is going to cost us eight trillion dollars,” or whatever their number is. Um, if you can’t persuade the American people that yes, there is going to be some increase in electricity rates on the front end, but that over the long term, because of combinations of more efficient energy usage, changing lightbulbs and more efficient appliance, but also technology improving how we can produce clean energy, the economy would benefit.
If we can’t make that argument persuasively enough, you - you, uh, can be Lyndon Johnson, you can be the master of Washington. You’re not going to get that done.
Even without cap-and-trade - or perhaps more accurately, even with a backdoor carbon tax through regulatory adventurism - Obama kept his promise to have electricity rates skyrocketing, and putting the burden on consumers, business, and taxpayers. Who said that every Obama promise comes with an expiration date?
Hockey Schtick
A paper published online yesterday in the journal Paleoceanography shows Nordic sea surface temperatures were as much as 6C higher than the present during the Holocene Climate Optimum (~ 9500 to 6000 years ago) and a “general cooling trend” over the past 7000 years. The paper finds changes in solar energy impacting the Earth (solar insolation) explain the natural cycles of cooling and warming seen in the proxy reconstruction. The study results clearly show no correlation with CO2 levels and once again demonstrate how the Sun controls climate, not CO2.
August Sea Surface Temperatures shown in the top graph show the Holocene Climate Optimum (HCO) was much hotter than the present and a general cooling trend over the past 7000 years. Note the present is at the left side of the graph & x axis legend is “Calendar years before the present” The last major ice age ended about 11,000 years ago.
PALEOCEANOGRAPHY, VOL. 26, PA2220, 15 PP., 2011 doi:10.1029/2010PA002002
Holocene climate variability of the Norwegian Atlantic Current during high and low solar insolation forcing
K. S. Berner, et al
A high-resolution sediment core from the Vøring Plateau has been studied to document the centennial to millennial variability of the surface water conditions during the Holocene Climate Optimum (HCO) and the late Holocene period (LHP) in order to evaluate the effects of solar insolation on surface ocean climatology. Quantitative August summer sea surface temperatures (SSSTs) with a time resolution of 2–40 years are reconstructed by using three different diatom transfer function methods. Spectral- and scale-space methods are applied to the records to explore the variability present in the time series at different time scales. The SSST development in core MD95-2011 shows a delayed response to Northern Hemisphere maximum summer insolation at ∼11,000 years B.P. The record shows the maximum SSST of the HCO to be from 7.3 to 8.9 kyr B.P., which implies that the site was located in the regional warm water pool removed from the oceanic fronts and Arctic waters. Superimposed on the general cooling trend are higher-frequency variabilities at time scales of 80-120, 210-320, 320-640, and 640-1280 years.
The climate variations at the time scale of 320-640 years are documented both for periods of high and low solar orbital insolation. We found evidence that the submillennial-scale mode of variability (640-900 years) in SSST evident during the LHP is directly associated with varying solar forcing. At the shorter scale of 260–450 years, the SSST during the LHP displays a lagged response to solar forcing with a phase-locked behavior indicating the existence of a feedback mechanism in the climate system triggered by variations in the solar constant as well as the role of the thermal inertia of the ocean. The abruptness of the cooling events in the LHP, especially pronounced during the onsets of the Holocene Cold Period I (approximately 2300 years B.P.) and the Little Ice Age (approximately 550 years B.P.), can be explained by a shutdown of deep convection in the Nordic Seas in response to negative solar insolation anomalies. These cooling events are on the order of 1.5C.
See the lack of warming in the tropical oceans to a depth of 700 meters in the Pacific based on buoys from 130E to 80W.
Enlarged. H/T Marc Morano
