Obama’s Clean Power Plan: Not The Transformation We Need

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Note: There is a lot of propaganda going around, much of it coming from the big green environmental groups, about how great the Obama Clean Power Plan is, how it is a transformative moment. The article below from Politico is the best analysis we’ve seen so far and it shows how tepid the plan really is, how it is non-transformative and only the tiniest possible step in the right direction. Dr. Sue Rubin describes the plan as a “(not so) clean power plan” She quotes Dr. James Hansen whose view describes the situation:

“We have two political parties, neither one of which is willing to face reality. Conservatives pretend it’s all a hoax, and liberals propose solutions that are non-solutions.”

What we really have underlying Hansen’s criticisms are two wings of a corporate party both of who protect the interests of the status quo. Add to that a the non-profit industrial complex big greens and the corporate mass media who hide the truth about so-called liberals.

Slate reports the plan is “business as usual” pointing out the plan acknowledges it will make no major changes:

. . . fully consistent with the recent changes and current trends in electricity generation, and as a result, would by no means entail fundamental redirection of the energy sector. (p. 636)

. . . under this rule, the trends for all other types of generation, including natural gas-fired generation, nuclear generation, and renewable generation, will remain generally consistent with what their trends would be in the absence of this rule. (p.637)

Rubin points out that “the Clean Power Plan is going to mean:

More fracking as natural gas is considered to be “cleaner” than coal.

More gas infrastructure projects: pipelines, compressor stations, underground storage, and offshore LNG ports.

Keystone XL pipeline remains on the table, still no decision to stop this project.

Shell still gets permits from the Obama administration for drilling for oil in the Arctic

Atlantic coast oil exploration still gets a thumbs up.

Nukes. Nothing clean about a nuke plant!

Energy Justice put forward in a letter to the EPA the steps that need to be taken for the Clean Power Plan to be effective:

Set more aggressive targets Comply with the Civil Rights Act and address environmental justice Regulate power plants (not states) and disallow pollution trading and offsets Close the methane loophole and not bless the move from coal to gas, which is worse for the climate than coal Close the biogenic CO2 loophole, and disallow a shift from coal to biomass and waste incineration, whose CO2 emissions are also worse than coal Disallow nuclear power subsidies Disallow new investment in old coal plants Reject carbon capture and sequestration and enhanced oil recovery

Friends of the Earth while praising regulating carbon pollution the first time describes the plan as:

…when measured against increasingly dire scientific warnings it is clear the rule is not enough to address our climate crisis. This rule is merely a down payment on the U.S’s historic climate responsibility. It isn’t enough for the U.S. to merely make reforms to our existing utility structure. We must boldly reshape our economy by democratizing energy to move beyond fossil fuels, including natural gas. Communities around the world need the U.S to take more action if they are to avoid the worst impacts of climate disruption.

Daphne Wysham of the Center for Sustainable Economy said of Obama’s plan:

“If Obama truly wants to leave behind an impressive climate change legacy, he needs to 1) withdraw Shell’s permit to drill in the Arctic; 2) end all new fossil fuel infrastructure projects across the U.S.; 3) ensure that all targets and timetables for greenhouse gas emissions reductions are in sync with what the climate science requires, which would get the U.S. to zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; 4) begin a World War II-type mobilization toward a 100 percent renewable energy economy; and 5) make the polluters, not the American people, pay for the significant costs of climate change adaptation and mitigation.”

The government is unable to do what is necessary. The people need to continue on two paths (1) protest and blockade carbon and nuclear energy infrastructure and operation; while (2) working in our communities to build the alternative we need. As you can see below, the Obama plan will make barely noticeable change, if the people organize we can do better. Of course, we still need to pressure governments to do the right thing, but we must take other steps while the government faces and acts on reality in a responsible way.

– PopRes

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5 reasons Obama’s transformative power plan won’t transform anything

By Michael Grunwald for Politico

Just about everyone seems to agree that President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan is an “ambitious” effort to rein in the electric sector’s carbon emissions. There’s intense debate whether it’s good-ambitious, a “sweeping” and “groundbreaking” effort to fight pollution and climate change, or bad-ambitious, a “draconian” and “job-killing” assault on the coal industry that will jack up America’s utility bills. But it’s been taken for granted on both sides that the Environmental Protection Agency’s draft regulations, expected to be finalized this summer, would smash the status quo.

Actually, they’re pretty weak.

This is partly because the Obama administration, understandably, wants the first-ever U.S. carbon limits to survive legal challenges, and to maintain enough political support to prevent Congress from shredding them. After she released the draft plan last June, EPA administrator Gina McCarthy told me her goal was something “doable, reasonable, and practical,” not something utopian. The mere existence of carbon rules should send a signal to markets about greenhouse-gas emissions, adding to the riskiness of investments in coal plants that already face stricter limits on soot, mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other toxics in the Obama era. The rules should also bolster Obama’s negotiators in this year’s global climate talks in Paris, sending a message that the U.S. is doing something about carbon.

But while environmentalists have hailed the Clean Power Plan as Obama’s crowning climate achievement, and Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have denounced it as climate radicalism, it doesn’t really anticipate more dramatic emissions reductions than we’re getting now. Overall, it seeks to cut power-sector emissions 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. That sounds like a lot, but the ongoing transformation of the U.S. grid—a shift from carbon-intensive coal to lower-carbon natural gas and zero-carbon renewables, plus a general easing of electricity demand—has already gotten us almost halfway to that goal, and the Clean Power Plan hasn’t even taken effect yet. Utilities would have to cut emissions less than 1 percent a year to make it the rest of the way. At that tepid rate, it’s hard to see how America could fulfill Obama’s genuinely ambitious recent pledge to cut our entire economy’s emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025, since the coal-heavy power sector is clearly our lowest-hanging fruit.

The EPA expects to finalize the plan this summer, so it still could get stronger. And any plan that regulates carbon will qualify as “historic,” the other adjective you hear a lot in the current debate. In its current form, though, at least five elements of the Obama plan—its treatment of coal, its state targets, its treatment of renewables, its approach to bioenergy, and its timelines—are a long way from “ambitious.”

1. Coal The EPA insists the Clean Power Plan is about limiting carbon from power plants, not limiting coal. But let’s be honest: Limiting carbon from power plants means limiting coal, which produces 75 percent of the electricity sector’s emissions. That’s why critics have portrayed the plan as a nuclear weapon in the war on coal. The thing is, the draft rules won’t do much to coal. It’s already declining, but the plan doesn’t really aim to accelerate the decline.

One giveaway is the plan’s projection that U.S. coal generation will drop just 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. It’s already dropped 20 percent—and aging coal plants with another 50 gigawatts of capacity, nearly 15 percent of the U.S. fleet, are already scheduled for retirement. In other words, the EPA expects the decline of coal toabate somewhat under the Clean Power Plan, even though the average coal plant is over 40 years old, nobody is planning new coal plants, and the coal industry is already scrambling to comply with a barrage of new clean-air and clean-water regulations that have nothing to do with carbon. The Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign is almost on schedule to achieve its goal of retiring every U.S. coal plant by 2030, yet the EPA plan projects that 30 percent of our power will still come from coal that year. That would be a disaster for the climate.

In fairness, those lame EPA projections are not binding. And McCarthy herself told me not to put too much stock in them. In a November interview, she predicted that “in the end, you will probably see significantly more emissions reductions than we anticipated.” That’s almost certainly true, because utilities seem likely to keep retiring coal plants at a rapid rate. But Obama’s carbon rules do not seem likely to drive many of those retirements—and the EPA’s nationwide projections are not the only giveaway.

2. State targets The Clean Power Plan doesn’t impose strict emissions limits; it merely assigns states targets for reducing their carbon intensity. The plan doesn’t mandate how to achieve those targets, either; it lets the states chart their own paths. While overwrought critics squeal about bureaucratic tyranny, the EPA’s documents outlining its plan are almost laughably deferential, full of references to “maximizing flexibility,” “making sure states have the flexibility they need,” “offering states broad flexibility,” and so on. This actually makes a lot of sense, practically as well as legally and politically. Washington bureaucrats don’t need to micromanage how states decide to cut their emissions. They just need to make sure emissions get cut.

The glaring hole in the plan is not the flexibility it gives states to meet targets, but the targets themselves. The states with the deepest addictions to coal—usually in the form of filthy plants built before the passage of the Clean Air Act—have some of the weakest targets for reducing their emissions. It’s amusing that McConnell is calling for states to rise up and defy the EPA, since his home state of Kentucky will only have to cut its emissions 18 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, and it’s already retiring so many inefficient coal boilers that state officials have said they doubt they’ll need to shut down any more to meet their target. The EPA came up with similarly modest targets for coal-rich states like West Virginia, Wyoming and Indiana. McCarthy told me the agency was trying to avoid years of negotiations about what was achievable, but when a plan sets targets that are likely to be achieved even without the plan, it’s hard to see the point of the plan.

3. Renewables The U.S. is enjoying a green revolution, with wind power up threefold in the Obama era and solar power up more than tenfold, thanks to a remarkable decline in costs that has continued to this day. But Obama’s EPA apparently believes this boom is about to go bust. If its projections for coal are unambitious, its projections for renewables are downright ridiculous, essentially assuming a collapse of America’s fastest-growing electricity sector.

For example: At least five states—Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota—are already producing more renewable electricity than they would be expected to produce under the Clean Power Plan by 2030. And at least seventeen states already have renewable power targets that are higher than the EPA’s. The Clean Power Plan target for California is 21 percent renewable by 2030, even though it’s required by law to reach 33 percent by 2020; the plan’s target for Hawaii is a mere 10 percent by 2030, while the state’s official goal is 40 percent. Overall, the draft EPA plan predicted just 21 gigawatts of new renewable-power capacity nationwide by 2030; the U.S. installed about half that much just last year.

I offered to bet McCarthy that the U.S. would beat the draft plan’s projections for renewables, but she said she agreed they were too low. Wind and solar power are already much cheaper than the EPA assumed when devising its models. But the body language out of the EPA, which already faces Clean Power Plan lawsuits by a dozen states, has not suggested that the final plan will be dramatically stronger.

4. Bioenergy When environmentalists have aired concerns about the plan, they’ve usually focused on its favorable treatment of nuclear power and natural gas. But nuclear power, setting aside its many challenges, is carbon-free. Why wouldn’t it get favorable treatment in carbon regulations? Natural gas does emit carbon, but much less than coal, so it would also look like an attractive substitute in just about any carbon regime. But as I wrote in January, the plan’s favorable treatment of bioenergy—power derived from trees, crops, or other plants—could be much more problematic.

The problem is that an EPA policy memo suggested the plan will treat most bioenergy as carbon-neutral, which could encourage massive amounts of deforestation, which would not be carbon-neutral at all. The EPA has waffled a bit about the memo, so it’s not clear whether the final plan’s approach to bioenergy will be as generous to the timber industry. Suffice to say that some bioenergy critics believe a lenient approach could end up producing far more emissions through the cutting and burning of trees than the rest of the Clean Power Plan would reduce.

5. Timelines If the Obama administration finalizes the Clean Power Plan this summer, and if it isn’t held up by litigation, states will be required to submit implementation plans by June 2016. Not really, though. They’ll be allowed to request extensions of up to two years. Then they EPA will have another year to review their plans. They won’t be required to begin implementation until 2020—assuming no litigation delays, and no reversals by future administrations. And when McCarthy spoke to the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners in February, she hinted that the EPA might give states even more time.

“You and I know that flexibility is the key to this proposal,” she said.

This is all a bit odd, because the EPA has set “interim goals” for 2020 that are much more ambitious than its targets for 2030. Overall power-sector emissions are somehow expected to drop more than 10 percent within the next five years, before implementation even begins, then less than 5 percent over the next ten years, after implementation is in full swing. It’s as if the carbon rules were supposed to relieve the pressure on states to reduce carbon.

In fact, they were supposed to minimize the risk of legal and political reversals. McCarthy is a climate hawk, and Obama cares about his climate legacy; his 2009 stimulus bill helped create the renewables boom, and a host of other EPA regulations have helped decimate the coal industry. There is every reason to believe the U.S. will continue to reduce its emissions whether or not the Clean Power Plan turns out to be ambitious.

But an ambitious plan would reduce more emissions. And isn’t that supposed to be the point?