Climate 411

Americans Have Caught the Fever

By Sam Parry / Published: July 3, 2014

This is an amazing, exciting time. I, like so many millions of Americans, have been completely swept up in the groundswell of exhilarating national pride peaking just as we are about to celebrate our 238th anniversary as an independent nation.It’s time to wave that flag high and proud!

Flickr/Little Baby G

Flickr/Little Baby G

Americans have caught on to a movement that most of the rest of the world has long embraced. From Germany to England, France to Mexico, Brazil to South Korea, it unites so much of the world in a common purpose, a shared sense of hope and global cooperation. And over these last few weeks, I have rejoiced as Americans have caught the fever.

No, I’m not referring to the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament – though that has been a real treat to watch. And hats off to the inspiring performance of the Stars and Stripes squad in Brazil. What an amazing effort against Belgium. As a parent of a young soccer player, I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Actually, I’m talking about the overwhelming support Americans are showing for real climate action since the EPA announced its landmark Clean Power Plan to slash carbon pollution from America’s power plants.

And how inspiring it is. We Americans have been debating national climate policy since I was in high school in the first Bush administration. Here we are (gulp) a quarter century later, and we now have a proposal to — for the first time ever — limit dangerous climate pollution from America’s fossil fuel-fired power plants, the largest source of climate pollution in the U.S.

Can you imagine that we have spent all this time with NO NATIONAL LIMITS on climate pollution from power plants? Frankly, it’s shocking.

We’ve spent years debating a national cap and trade bill, a carbon tax, and a wide range of renewable energy standards to drive down America’s dependence on fossil fuels. And, we’ve made some progress.

But, all along, our fossil fuel-fired power plants were left unchecked, allowed to spew carbon dioxide into our atmosphere with no national limits.

That’s why the EPA Clean Power Plan is so essential and it’s why every American who cares about clean energy and a safer climate future should take action and support strong limits.

When the EPA announced its proposal a month ago, it was supposed to be divisive. It was supposed to ignite a furor of debate. The vaunted Big Carbon PR machine was supposed to be geared up and ready to grind the proposal to a pulp.

But, something funny happened on the way to cleaner energy. In the weeks since the EPA announced its pollution reduction plan, there has been a profound and perplexing lack of coherent or competent response from the richly financed corporate public relations industry. Yes, the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, the National Mining Association, and others are using this as a wedge issue to ramp up political pressure.

But, these squawking voices have been countered by former Republican EPA Administrators and former Republican Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who have stepped up in recent weeks to support climate action. Even some utility companies have warmed to the proposal.

Overall, public support has been overwhelmingly positive. A Washington Post poll last month found that as many as 70 percent of all Americans support carbon pollution limits for power plants — including 63 percent of Republicans and 69 percent of Independents.

Let’s be very clear about this. There are precious few political issues these days that garner 70 percent support – across all political lines. That’s important. And it is heartwarming evidence that America is ready to act on climate.

So, on this Independence Day, I’m planning to celebrate our great country by watching some World Cup soccer, enjoying the day off with my family, and rejoicing in the hope and opportunity we have as a country to unleash our clean energy future.

Go, go USA. I believe that we will act!

Also posted in Clean Power Plan, Policy, What Others are Saying / Comments are closed

Supreme Court Reaffirms EPA’s Bedrock Legal Authority to Cut Carbon Pollution from Power Plants

By Tomas Carbonell / Published: June 27, 2014

Source: Openclipart

The United States Supreme Court issued a long-awaited decision in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA (No. 12-1146) this week, resolving the last of many multi-year legal challenges to EPA’s first generation of climate protections under the Clean Air Act.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-to-2 that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) permissibly read the Clean Air Act to require large new or modified industrial pollution sources to deploy modern pollution controls for greenhouse gases. Thus, new and rebuilt large emitters of other regulated pollutants such as particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and oxides of nitrogen subject to the Clean Air Act’s pre-construction review permit program must use the “best available control technology” to control climate pollution.

This is now the third decision in which the Court has affirmed the application of the Clean Air Act to climate pollution.

A 5-to-4 majority of the court also held that EPA must narrow its permit program to avoid applying the permitting program to many smaller sources that EPA itself had taken steps to exclude from regulation.

The UARG case emphatically puts an end to the misplaced claims by some who question EPA’s bedrock authority to address the deleterious carbon pollution from power plants and other industrial sources under section 111 and the Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) permit program of the Clean Air Act. The central question in the UARG case was not whether EPA must address climate-destabilizing pollution from power plants and other industrial sources, but rather how EPA should carry out these essential clean air protections.

When it took up the UARG case, the Supreme Court decided not to review EPA’s rigorous, science-based determination in 2009 that six greenhouse gases endanger the public health and welfare of current and future generations — the legal foundation for addressing climate pollution under the Clean Air Act. The Court similarly declined to review EPA’s landmark rules in 2010 setting the first limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new passenger vehicles (the Clean Car Standards). The Supreme Court’s review of UARG was focused exclusively on EPA’s interpretation of the PSD permitting program. Nothing about the Supreme Court’s final decision in UARG affects the Clean Car Standards or the science-based finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare and therefore must be addressed under the Clean Air Act. And in UARG, seven justices of the Court agreed with EPA that large industrial sources that are already required to obtain PSD permits due to their emissions of other regulated pollutants must limit their greenhouse gas emissions with “best available control technology.”

The UARG case also reinforces EPA’s clear legal authority to reduce carbon pollution from the nation’s fossil fuel-fired power plants, which emit nearly forty percent of the United States’ carbon dioxide and are currently subject to no national limits on carbon pollution. As described in detail on our earlier blogs, EPA has proposed long-overdue and much-needed rules under section 111 of the Clean Air Act that would, for the first time, require new power plants to use advanced technologies available for carbon reduction — and would reduce carbon pollution from existing power plants to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 through available cost-effective solutions. Together, these rules would cut carbon pollution from our nation’s largest source, achieve significant reductions in other harmful pollutants that are emitted together with carbon pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants, and spur complementary action in other countries.

The Supreme Court has affirmed time and again EPA’s authority to regulate carbon pollution, and it further reiterated this precedent in UARG:

  • Seven years ago in Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court held that “greenhouse gases fit well within the Act’s capacious definition of ‘air pollutant,’” and are therefore clearly within EPA’s authority to regulate under the Clean Air Act. 549 U.S. 497, 532 (2007). In UARG, the Court rejected requests by some of the parties to overturn this fundamental holding.
  • Four years later in American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court explicitly acknowledged EPA’s authority to limit carbon pollution from existing power plants, holding that it was “plain” that section 111 of the Clean Air Act “speaks directly to emissions of carbon dioxide from the defendants’ plants.” 131 S. Ct. 2527, 2537 (2011). 
  • During the February 24, 2014 oral argument in UARG, industry attorney Peter Keisler conceded, in response to questioning from Justice Ginsburg, that EPA has clear authority to address climate pollution from power plants under section 111.  The Court specifically acknowledged and reiterated this holding in UARG – noting that the section 111 is “not at issue here” and that “no party in American Electric Power argued [section 111] was ill suited to accommodating greenhouse gases.”

It is always an important occasion when the Supreme Court weighs in on legal issues affecting the Clean Air Act. It’s especially important when the Court is addressing the climate pollution that presents a clear and present danger to the health of our communities and families and to our prosperity.

Also posted in Climate Change Legislation, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Policy / Comments are closed

“Risky Business” stands out in growing sea of climate reports

By Gernot Wagner / Published: June 26, 2014
Receding beach on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Source: FEMA/Tim Burkitt

(This blog originally appeared on EDF Voices)

This blog post was co-authored by Jonathan Camuzeaux.

Put Republican Hank Paulson, Independent Mike Bloomberg, and Democrat Tom Steyer together, and out comes one of the more unusual – and unusually impactful – climate reports.

This year alone has seen a couple of IPCC tomes, an entry by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the most recent U.S. National Climate Assessment.

The latest, Risky Business, stands apart for a number of reasons, and it’s timely with the nation debating proposed, first-ever limits on greenhouse gas emissions from nearly 500 power plants.

Tri-partisan coalition tackles climate change

The report is significant, first, because we have a tri-partisan group spanning George W. Bush’s treasury secretary Paulson, former mayor of New York Bloomberg, and environmentalist investor Steyer – all joining forces to get a message through.

That list of names alone should make one sit up and listen.

Last time a similar coalition came together was in the dog days of 2009, when Senators Lindsay Graham, Joe Lieberman, and John Kerry were drafting the to-date last viable (and ultimately unsuccessful) Senate climate bill.

Global warming is hitting home

Next, Risky Business is important because it shows how climate change is hitting home. No real surprise there for anyone paying attention to globally rising temperatures, but the full report goes into much more granular details than most, focusing on impacts at county, state and regional levels.

Risky Business employs the latest econometric techniques to come up with numbers that should surprise even the most hardened climate hawks and wake up those still untouched by reality. Crop yield losses, for example, could go as high as 50 to 70 percent (!) in some Midwestern and Southern states, absent agricultural adaptation.

The report is also replete with references to heat strokes, sky-rocketing electricity demand for air conditioning, and major losses from damages to properties up and down our ever-receding coast lines.

Not precisely uplifting material, yet this report does a better job than most in laying it all out.

Financial markets can teach us a climate lesson

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Risky Business gets the framing exactly right: Climate change is replete with deep-seated risks and uncertainties.

In spite of all that we know about the science, there’s lots more that we don’t. And none of that means that climate change isn’t bad. As the report makes clear, what we don’t know could potentially be much worse.

Climate change, in the end, is all about risk management.

Few are better equipped to face up to that reality than the trio spearheading the effort; Paulson, Bloomberg and Steyer have made their careers (and fortunes) in the financial sector. In fact, as United States Treasury secretary between 2006 and 2009, Paulson was perhaps closest of anyone to the latest, global example of what happens when risks get ignored.

We cannot – must not – ignore risk when it comes to something as global as global warming. After all, for climate, much like for financial markets, it’s not over ‘til the fat tail zings.

Also posted in Basic Science of Global Warming, Cars and Pollution, Economics, Extreme Weather, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Health, Jobs, Policy / Read 1 Response

Defenders of dirty power plants use doublespeak to shape debate

By Keith Gaby / Published: June 26, 2014
Under the proposed Clean Power Plan, plants must cut carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

(This blog originally appeared on EDF Voices)

As we’ve noted before, few opponents of the federal Clean Power Plan want to stand up and say they favor unlimited carbon pollution. So they’re apt to frame their arguments in more clever ways.

Under the proposed Clean Power Plan, plants must cut carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Sometimes their approach is to use misleading statistics – like when they talk about the cost of moving to clean energy without mentioning the much larger benefits of doing so.

Or they’ll use an appealing bit of logic, which sounds right until it’s exposed to the way the world really works.

It takes more than one EPA rule

One of those seemingly-logical attacks is the complaint that the plan the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rolled out June 2 won’t solve climate change.

A CATO Institute blog says, “EPA’s Regulations Will Not Mitigate Climate Change.” At first glance, that seems like a step forward from the crazier objections – for instance, that climate change doesn’t exist.

But it’s really just a new strategy aimed at the same goal, like a lawyer who failed to impress the jury with an insanity defense and is now piecing together a fake alibi.

Your suspicions should be raised immediately when coal conglomerates complain that an EPA rule does “little” to solve an environmental problem, which on the surface sounds like a worthy objection. Why should the United States take this step to end unlimited pollution from power plants, they ask, when it won’t resolve the problem we are facing?

The complaint rests on the idea that the pollution reductions from U.S. power plants will not cut enough emissions to stop global warming. And that’s true.

It’s like telling Ike to call off D-Day because the landing alone wouldn’t defeat the Germans.

Even though power plant emissions are the largest source of carbon pollution in the United States – as of 2011, our utilities put out more of this pollution than the entire economies of every foreign country but China – they’re only a portion of total global output. So this plan does not, on its own, solve climate change.

But this argument is sort of like telling Ike to call off D-Day because the landing alone wouldn’t defeat the Germans.

Or it’s like telling a person with multiple risk factors for heart disease to keep smoking, because quitting won’t prevent an attack on its own. The reality is that in solving big problems, a major first step is always necessary and it’s always insufficient.

The most important truth – in fact, the very reason some in industry are scrambling for arguments to oppose this new rule – is that the Clean Power Plan is a turning point in our environmental and economic history.

A historic step

For the first time, we’ll cut carbon emissions from their largest source, and begin to drive greater investment in abundant, affordable clean energy.

It will also have a big impact around the world. Addressing a major global problem in the 21st Century requires America to lead by example.

By making a substantial cut in our largest source of carbon emissions, we will not only cut billions of tons of pollution, we will enable a much bigger step forward internationally.

Let’s face it: Most of those in the fossil fuel industry who argue that the Clean Power Plan doesn’t cut enough pollution are really just trying to make sure we don’t cut any pollution at all.

They know that if they’re able to intimidate the Congress into blocking these rules, it would make it substantially less likely that the U.S. and the rest of the world will move forward to a cleaner future.

But there’s an easy test to tell if someone offering this complaint is sincere: If they’re making suggestions to further strengthen the final rule, then they’re actually interested in a solution.

If not, they’re just trying to keep America living in the past.

Also posted in Clean Power Plan, Energy, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Setting the Facts Straight / Comments are closed

Supreme Court Decision Leaves Greenhouse Gas Permit Requirements for Large Industrial Polluters in Place

By Pamela Campos / Published: June 23, 2014

(This post was written by EDF Senior Attorneys Pamela Campos and Peter Zalzal)

Source: Daderot (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

This morning the Supreme Court issued a 7-to-2 decision confirming that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may continue to require large industrial sources of climate pollution to use the best available control technology when building or rebuilding plants.  A 5-to-4 majority also determined that such pre-construction permits would not be required for the many smaller sources that EPA had concluded would pose significant administrative problems.

Today’s decision is good news for all of us exposed to the health and climate impacts of new industrial plants. It also leaves the vast majority of already-issued greenhouse gas permits untouched.

While there are a handful of permits potentially impacted by today’s decision, an EPA database shows that the vast majority of permits issued between 2011 and 2013 cover both greenhouse gases and other pollutants.

A separate EPA update from March 2014 shows that the large majority of permits issued are for exactly the type of plants Congress, and the Supreme Court, had in mind – large industrial sources such as power plants, oil and gas-related plants, chemical plants, and cement plants.

By design, EPA’s tailoring rule applied only to the largest sources of air pollution. For the first six months of implementation, the rule explicitly applied only to sources emitting large amounts of both greenhouse gases and other air pollutants. In the last 3 years, permits have been required only for the largest sources of greenhouse gas pollutants – the types of sources that also emit large amounts of non-greenhouse gas pollutants. (See slides 26 and 27 of this EPA presentation)

Since 2011, more than 160 new and modified large industrial sources have incorporated the best available technologies for limiting greenhouse gases.

As a result, we have new and updated power plants in California that have improved efficiency by up to 88 percent, gas plants in Maryland that are using high-efficiency combined cycle turbines that reduce facility costs, and cement kilns that have cut greenhouse gas pollution by 40 percent while reducing energy costs. (See pages 38 and 39 of this legal brief filed by the states)

Today’s decision means that the Clean Air Act will continue to play a role in advancing use of efficient, cost-effective technologies that cut both global and local air pollution from large polluters. And that’s good news for all of us.

Also posted in EPA litgation, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Policy / Comments are closed

Saving Billions While Cutting Climate Pollution

By Jason Mathers / Published: June 12, 2014

More fuel efficient, lower emission heavy trucks are good for business, good for consumers, and good for combating climate change. By deploying existing and emerging technologies to improve truck efficiency, the U.S. can save billions in fuel expenses while cutting harmful climate pollutions by millions of tons.

EDF is calling on the Obama Administration to set new fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas standards for heavy trucks that cut fuel consumption by 40 percent compared to 2010 levels. These standards would apply for freight trucks and heavy-duty work trucks, such as box delivery trucks, bucket trucks, beverage delivery trucks and refuse trucks.

Analysis by leading environmental and energy efficiency advocates, including EDF, demonstrates that bold heavy truck standards are technically feasible and will be effective in cutting oil consumption and climate pollution.

Strong standards will be good for American business and consumers too.

EDF and Ceres examined how strong standards would affect the cost of moving freight by trucks. The results are unequivocal — strong standards will save companies money.

For example, an owner of a new tractor-trailer unit stands to save between $21,000  and $36,000 during the first year the truck is in service.

By 2030, the combination of both phases of standards will cut fuel use by 1.4 million barrels per day and reduce carbon pollution by 270 million metric tons, compared to the fuel use and emissions that would occur without fuel efficiency improvements.

Companies stand to save nearly $8 billion dollars in 2030 too, as the cost-per-mile to move freight will decrease by $0.07 a mile as a result of the second phase rules alone.

By 2040, these savings could grow to $25 billion annually, as the net effect of the second phase of the standard alone could be to reduce the per-mile cost of moving freight by 21 cents.

Our finding of significant financial benefits of strong fuel efficiency and GHG standards is consistent in magnitude with previous analysis. A recent report by the Consumer Federation of America looked at similar Phase 2 standards and found net savings of $250 to consumers, rising to $400 per household in 2035 as fuel prices and transportation services increase.

With such savings at hand, a natural question is why do we need new standards in the first place? We need new standards because well-designed federal standards foster the innovation necessary to bring more efficient and lower emitting trucks to market.

Strong standards break down barriers that keep technologies from moving from the test track to the assembly line.

Manufacturers need to be confident in market demand in order to develop and launch efficiency improvements. Strong standards give them the certainty they need.

Fleets are often weary of investing in advanced technologies; as such capital investments could put them at a disadvantage if fuel prices drop suddenly, like they did in 2008. For-hire trucking fleets also directly pass on a large percentage of their fuel bill through fuel surcharges to their customers, thus distorting the economic incentive to invest in efficiency.

Manufacturers and fleets can benefit significantly from strong standards. As the EDF analysis demonstrates, manufacturers will have a market for more valuable equipment; while fleets will achieve significant overall savings.

In fact, this is just the type of impact we are seeing from the first phase of heavy trucks standards, which went into effect at the start of this year. Fleets and Manufacturers are praising the rule and new, cost-effect offerings have come onto the market.

Moving forward on strong heavy-truck efficiency and emissions standards is a step that our country needs to take.

Also posted in Cars and Pollution / Comments are closed