Climate 411

The fight for transparency and accountability at EPA

By Ben Levitan / Published: October 27, 2017

This blog was co-authored by Surbhi Sarang, EDF Legal Fellow.

Since taking the helm at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt has attempted to hide his activities from scrutiny by limiting the public’s access to information.

He has ended the decades-long, bipartisan practice of releasing the daily schedules of top agency leadership, removed EPA webpages, and announced harmful policies close in time with private meetings with lobbyists from affected industries.

EDF has been at the forefront of efforts to promote transparency and accountability at EPA. That’s why we just filed a lawsuit to compel EPA to comply with its legal duty to release public records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Scott Pruitt’s record of secrecy and ethical conflicts

Scott Pruitt’s opaqueness and secrecy have sharply contrasted with basic principles of good government.

Under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, the Office of Government Ethics issued regulations for executive branch employees:

To ensure that every citizen can have complete confidence in the integrity of the Federal Government.

Among other requirements:

Employees shall act impartially and not give preferential treatment to any private organization or individual” and “shall endeavor to avoid any actions creating the appearance that they are violating the law or . . . ethical standards.

The Office of Government Ethics titled this regulation the “basic obligation of public service.”

Pruitt and his senior leadership have raised serious questions as to whether they are abiding by these principles.

In just one example, earlier this summer thirteen state Attorneys General formally objected to a guidance letter in which Pruitt expressed his flawed, misleading opinion about a crucial issue in litigation over the Clean Power Plan — America’s only nationwide limits on carbon pollution from existing power plants.

The Attorneys General wrote that Pruitt’s conduct was “inconsistent with his agreement not to participate in the litigation,” given that he repeatedly sued EPA over the Clean Power Plan when he served as Attorney General of Oklahoma.

Pruitt also discontinued the practice of releasing his schedule, along with the schedules of senior leadership.

The bipartisan practice of releasing schedules stretches back decades and was initiated expressly:

In order to make the public fully aware of [the Administrator’s] contacts with interested persons.

Following months of public pressure and more than 60 FOIA requests, Pruitt finally released a partial public account of his schedule. But that account provides only a minimal level of detail of how and with whom Pruitt spends his time.

Pruitt later released a more detailed appointments calendar, but it covered a limited date range and included many redactions worthy of additional scrutiny. And neither of those releases provides any transparency for other EPA senior officials.

To obtain any more information about how EPA leadership spends its time, EDF’s only recourse has been to demand the release of these public records under FOIA.

EDF’s efforts to promote transparency and accountability

EDF is taking action to protect important standards of transparency and accountability at EPA — and to keep the public informed about policymaking that directly impacts the health and environment of all Americans.

Our lawsuit concerns three FOIA requests that directly address the integrity of EPA’s operations. For each request, EPA’s legally mandated deadline for providing a response is several months overdue, despite EDF’s extensive outreach to EPA over many months in an effort to elicit the requested records.

The first request seeks records related to the ethics agreement that Pruitt signed shortly after his nomination to lead EPA, in which he outlined:

[S]teps that [he] will take to avoid any actual or apparent conflict of interest.

We submitted this FOIA request in January 2017 – more than nine months ago.

Pruitt’s ethics agreement diverged from the standard language used by the Office of Government Ethics – even though Pruitt’s longstanding and very public opposition to a litany of EPA’s public health and environmental safeguards calls into question his ability to be impartial, particularly on matters in which he represented Oklahoma and long ago took fixed positions. Since taking the oath of office as Administrator, Pruitt has actively tried to undermine public health and environmental protections — like the Clean Power Plan — and has proposed to repeal protections that he had long attacked while Attorney General of Oklahoma.

Our FOIA request seeks records pertaining to the evaluation of Pruitt’s actual or potential conflicts of interest, including any analysis that informed his ethics agreement.

The second request is for records related to Pruitt’s and his senior managers’ schedules.

The most complete information we’ve received so far on Pruitt’s activities is only a select snapshot released through a FOIA request. That snapshot contains more than 100 redacted calendar appointments, and only runs through mid-May.

Even this limited information reveals the special access granted to polluter lobbyists — many of whom come from industries that have supported Pruitt’s political career for years. A more comprehensive release, including the calendars of senior EPA managers, would provide a fuller picture of the constituency that Pruitt and his political staff are serving.

The third request is for public documents related to threats to scientific integrity at EPA.

EDF requested these records in light of the Trump Transition Team’s efforts to single out civil servants at the Department of Energy who worked on climate science and policy. Since we submitted this FOIA request more than seven months ago, subsequent events — including the removal of EPA’s Climate Science website, scientific distortions that accompanied the proposal to repeal the Clean Power Plan, threatened efforts that would compromise the integrity of EPA advisory boards, and the muzzling of EPA scientists who were scheduled to deliver public presentations on climate change — have only increased the urgency of providing public access to records about the treatment of scientific integrity at EPA.

EDF will continue working to protect transparency and accountability at EPA by supporting Americans’ ability to access information about health and environmental policies, and by shining a light on the Trump Administration’s attacks on vital safeguards for families and communities across America.

Posted in Clean Air Act, Clean Power Plan, EPA litgation, Policy, Setting the Facts Straight / Comments are closed

Trump Administration misleads Americans about the cost of climate pollution

By Susanne Brooks / Published: October 25, 2017

The Trump Administration is attempting to justify the rollback of crucial environmental and health protections by vastly undervaluing the costs of climate change.

The latest safeguards under attack are the Clean Power Plan, the nation’s first-ever limits on carbon pollution from existing power plants, and the Bureau of Land Management’s vital standards to reduce wasted natural gas from oil and gas facilities on public and tribal lands. They would have health, environmental, and economic benefits worth an estimated billions of dollars annually. But you wouldn’t know it from reading the Administration’s recently revised documents – because of a series of deceptive accounting tricks, including efforts aimed at obscuring the benefits of reducing carbon pollution.

The Trump Administration has used discredited methods to eviscerate the social cost of carbon — an estimate of the costs that carbon pollution inflicts on the public, represented as the dollar value of the total damages from emitting one ton of carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere.

The social cost of carbon is a tool that helps ensure that policymakers consider the health, environmental and economic benefits of avoiding extreme weather, rising temperatures and intensifying smog when they make decisions that affect climate pollution.

Climate change harms businesses, families, governments and taxpayers through rising health care costs, destruction of property, increased food prices and more — so it’s common sense that we should properly account for the value of avoiding these harmful outcomes. But the Trump Administration has systematically undermined and attacked the well-established science of climate change – including the social cost of carbon, which has had a target on its back for a while now.

The most up-to-date estimates of the social costs of carbon were developed by an Interagency Working Group (IWG) of experts from a dozen federal agencies. They were developed through a transparent and rigorous process based on the latest peer-reviewed science and economics, and with input from the public and the National Academy of Sciences.

But in March, President Trump cast aside the results of this thorough and consultative process. He issued an executive order aimed at discrediting the IWG estimates, withdrawing them as government policy, and directing federal agencies to pick their own metric.

The executive order leaves federal agencies to fend for themselves without specific guidance, opens the door to extensive legal challenges, and effectively sets up agencies to cook the books to serve the Administration’s goals.

That’s exactly what EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Department of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke just did – releasing benefit-cost analyses that massively undervalue the costs of carbon pollution, radically reducing the estimates by up to 97 percent.

The Trump Administration would have us believe that the costs of carbon pollution are near zero. The Administration’s new estimates are only a couple dollars per ton of carbon dioxide – about as much as a cup of coffee or a bus ticket.

Sadly, communities around the country are already seeing just how wrong that is. From longer wildfire seasons to more intense hurricanes, the American public is already bearing the enormous costs of climate change.

Even the IWG estimates – roughly $50 per ton of carbon dioxide based on year 2020 emissions – are almost certainly a conservative lower bound since they do not yet reflect many different types of climate impacts.

A closer look at the Administration’s deceptive math 

There are two major flaws in the Administration’s drastically reduced estimates, both of which fly in the face of established science and economic principles in service of obscuring the very real benefits of climate action.

First, the reduced estimates ignore that carbon emissions are a global pollutant, so they omit important categories of climate change impacts on the United States.

Second, they shortchange the harm to our children and future generations from climate change.

The so-called “domestic-only” estimate

Since the impacts of carbon pollution are felt globally regardless of where the emissions come from, leading researchers and the IWG have appropriately focused on accounting for that full global impact.

In contrast, the Administration’s revised estimates claim to consider “domestic-only” impacts to the United States. But that title is a misnomer – the Administration’s flawed approach ignores important categories of impacts that affect the American public. Climate impacts beyond our borders have costly repercussions for U.S. citizens in the form of changing global migration patterns, economic and political destabilization, and other “spillover” effects.

The National Academy of Sciences specifically rejected the approach the Administration is taking in a report released earlier this year, concluding that:

[C]limate damages to the United States cannot be accurately characterized without accounting for consequences outside U.S. borders.

Economist Richard Newell – president of the think tank Resources for the Future, which is leading an effort to implement the Nation Academy of Sciences’ recommendations to update the social cost of carbon estimates – has criticized the Administration’s approach, saying that considering only direct domestic impacts is:

[U]nnecessarily constrained and unwise for addressing inherently global pollutants like greenhouse gases.

The use of a “domestic-only” number also harms Americans because it undervalues the cost of climate pollution and encourages other countries to similarly undervalue – and over-emit – this pollution.

More than half a dozen leading experts argue:

[The] United States benefits tremendously if other countries set policy based on global rather than local effects.

They also point out that the use of a global estimate can encourage reciprocal climate action elsewhere. For instance, the Canadian government incorporated the U.S. IWG value in its own policy analysis.

Undervaluing the impacts on children and future generations

The Administration’s estimates also use a sharply lower value for the benefits that today’s carbon reductions provide to children and future generations. Again, this is in direct conflict with the weight of expert opinion that supports valuing these impacts even more than we did before the Trump Administration.

The Administration’s estimates “discount” future impacts at 7 percent – a rate significantly higher than the 3 percent central rate of the IWG, and one that is wholly unsupported by the economics literature when it comes to the long-lived intergenerational effects of carbon pollution.

A growing consensus among leading economists supports lower or declining discount rates, as does the Council of Economic Advisors.

As Richard Newell of Resources for the Future points out:

Practically speaking, the use of such a high discount rate means that the effects of our actions on future generations are largely unaccounted for in the new analysis.

In other words, the Administration’s estimates reveal just how little they value protecting American children and generations to come.

The social cost of carbon has profound influence on our policy process and embodies the very real costs of climate change that communities around the country are already feeling.

The Administration’s distortion of these values is illustrative of a frequent strategy of theirs – twisting the facts to validate their desired outcome, and in the process sowing doubt around the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change.

Unfortunately, while the math the Administration is using is warped, the costs of climate change are still very real – and the American public is footing the bill.

Posted in Clean Power Plan, Economics, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Policy, Setting the Facts Straight / Comments are closed

EPA refuses to act on smog pollution. Here’s what’s at stake.

By Rachel Fullmer / Published: October 23, 2017

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is refusing to move forward with the implementation of health-based standards that protect Americans from dangerous ground-level ozone pollution — more commonly known as smog.

That’s why Environmental Defense Fund, along with a broad coalition of public health and environmental groups, sent a letter to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt informing him that we will take legal action if he does not carry out his mandatory duty to begin implementing our nation’s 2015 health-based smog standard.

Smog is a caustic pollutant that irritates the lungs, exacerbates lung conditions like asthma, and is linked to a wide-array of serious heart and lung diseases.

It is particularly harmful for children, seniors, people with lung impairments like asthma, and anyone active outdoors.

Under the Clean Air Act, October 1, 2017 was the deadline for identifying the communities that meet our nation’s health-based smog standard, and for identifying those that are violating the standard. Administrator Pruitt missed this mandatory deadline to begin implementing the smog safeguards.

The Clean Air Act’s statutory deadlines are not merely suggestions – they are of critical importance to achieving better air quality. When EPA shirks mandatory deadlines, the Clean Air Act’s mechanisms to improve air quality fail to engage and American families suffer the harmful effects of breathing polluted air for longer.

Administrator Pruitt unlawfully attempted to extend this same deadline, by one year, earlier this summer. However, he was forced to withdraw this extension and reinstate the October 1, 2017 deadline in response to legal challenges filed by EDF and our public health partners, and by a coalition of 16 state Attorneys General.

Now Pruitt has failed to meet the deadline – adding to his concerning pattern of delay, and undermining these important public health safeguards.

Here’s more on the consequences of ignoring our national health-based smog standards:

By delaying implementation of the standards, EPA is allowing vulnerable communities to suffer the consequences of polluted air while Administrator Pruitt stalls.

For instance, delaying the standards will mean that residents of the Uintah Basin in Northeastern Utah will potentially be faced with more and longer exposure to pollution levels that at times can rival smoggy Los Angeles.

This is truly unacceptable when there are clear solutions for reducing smog and protecting public health, such as reducing the pollution emitted from the thousands of oil and gas wells that dot the basin – common sense solutions that would be helped along if the 2015 health-based smog standard was properly and timely implemented.

Administrator Pruitt’s failure to identify which communities have air quality that violates the health standard obscures Americans’ basic right to know whether the very air we breathe meets the level that EPA has determined to be healthy.

The health-based national air quality standard for deadly air pollutants like smog form the foundation of the Clean Air Act — a bedrock public health statute that has provided for extraordinary, bipartisan progress in protecting Americans’ health and the environment for more than 40 years.

These consensus-backed health standards save lives and protect American families. By EPA’s own estimate, compliance with the 2015 smog standard will save hundreds of lives, prevent 230,000 asthma attacks in children, and prevent 160,000 missed school days for children each year.

Failure to carry out his responsibilities under our nation’s clean air laws also demonstrates Administrator Pruitt’s disregard for the recommendations of EPA’s own public health experts and scientists.

The 2015 health-based standard for smog was developed through a rigorous and extensive rulemaking process over the course of several years, and the science on smog’s health impacts is well-established.

EPA finalized a revised, strengthened standard of 70 parts per billion after engaging in a transparent, public process and relying on well-established scientific information and the recommendations of an independent committee of scientific advisors.

Administrator Pruitt has a legal duty to carry out the health standard to ensure healthier, longer lives for millions of Americans afflicted by dangerous smog pollution. That’s why EDF joined so many others in telling him we’ll go to court if he doesn’t.

Those joining us on the notice of intent to sue are the American Lung Association, American Public Health Association, American Thoracic Society, Appalachian Mountain Club, Earthjustice, Environmental Law & Policy Center, National Parks Conservation Association, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and West Harlem Environmental Action.

The Attorneys General of New York, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Washington D.C. sent a similar letter.

We urges Administrator Pruitt to “expeditiously” carry out his responsibility under our nation’s clean air law to protect the health of our families and communities. There is no time to waste.

Posted in Clean Air Act, Health, Partners for Change, Policy, Smog / Comments are closed

Yes, Administrator Pruitt, EPA does have the obligation to protect America from climate pollution

By Tomas Carbonell / Published: October 19, 2017

(This post was co-authored by EDF’s Ben Levitan)

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is once again misleading the American people in an effort to avoid doing his job.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was interviewed on Fox News this week, and questioned his legal authority and responsibility to protect the public from the pollution that causes climate change.

During that interview, Pruitt asked:

[W]hat authority has Congress given the EPA to engage in rulemaking to reduce [carbon dioxide]?

Pruitt made similar remarks at the Heritage Foundation earlier this week – peddling the discredited notion that the “Clean Air Act was set up to address local and regional air pollutants, not the global phenomena of [climate pollution].”

We’ve written about this extensively at EDF. We’re happy to go over it one more time to help Administrator Pruitt, since he seems to be having trouble understanding it.

  • That authority is in the Clean Air Act, which is a law that was passed by Congress.
  • We know that authority is in the Clean Air Act because the Supreme Court told us so.
  • The Supreme Court then said so again – and again after that.

So to sum up, we’ve been told by the High Court three times that the authority is indeed in the law that was passed by Congress.

Pruitt’s remarks come just over a week after he signed a proposed rule to abolish the Clean Power Plan — America’s only nationwide limit on climate pollution from fossil fuel power plants.

EPA is legally obligated to protect Americans from harmful climate pollution, but Pruitt’s destructive proposal would leave American communities exposed to greater climate risks, and cost thousands of American lives by increasing dangerous air pollution.

Pruitt’s words on Fox News, and even more so his actions, are appalling. The official who is charged with administering our nation’s clean air laws for the benefit of the American people – laws that the Supreme Court has now held on three separate occasions clearly apply to pollutants that are driving destructive climate change – should not be questioning his basic job description.

Communities and families across the country are already feeling the impacts of climate change through stronger hurricanes, increased flooding, more damaging wildfires, rising sea levels, worsened air quality, and more intense heat waves. Americans overwhelmingly want swift action to address this clear and urgent threat – not Pruitt’s distortions and delay.

Here’s more detail about Pruitt’s legal responsibilities:

Contrary to Pruitt’s claims, the Supreme Court has repeatedly and unequivocally affirmed that Congress gave EPA authority to regulate climate pollution:

  • In Massachusetts v. EPA (549 U.S. 497, 2007), the Supreme Court found “without a doubt” that climate pollution falls within the broad definition of “air pollutants” covered by the Clean Air Act. The Court ordered EPA to make a science-based determination as to whether those pollutants endanger public health and welfare. EPA finalized its determination 2009. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit categorically rejected a barrage of legal challenges to the determination, including one brought by Scott Pruitt when he was attorney general of Oklahoma.
  • In American Electric Power v. Connecticut (564 U.S. 410, 2011), the Supreme Court unanimously held that the Clean Air Act “speaks directly” to the problem of climate pollution from power plants – a point that even opponents of the Clean Power Plan conceded at oral argument in the case.
  • In Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA (134 S. Ct. 2427, 2014), the Supreme Court held that the Clean Air Act obligated EPA to ensure that new and modified industrial facilities apply the best available control technology to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide.

Scott Pruitt’s latest statement questioning EPA’s authority not only contradicts the rulings of the Supreme Court, it departs from the views of former EPA Administrators who have served in administrations of both political parties.

As Christine Todd Whitman, EPA Administrator under George W. Bush, put it:

I think, as a matter of law, that carbon is a pollutant has been settled.

Pruitt’s comments to Fox News also contradict his own previous statements to Congress. During his confirmation hearing to become EPA Administrator, Pruitt told United States Senators that the Supreme Court rulings were the “law of the land” and needed to be “enforced and respected.”

In the Fox News interview, Pruitt also took aim at the Clean Power Plan, repeating his false claim that the Supreme Court held the plan to be unlawful.

In fact, the Supreme Court never issued an opinion on the merits of the Clean Power Plan. It never even heard the case.

The Supreme Court simply put the Clean Power Plan on hold until legal challenges played out in the courts. And since then, Pruitt’s EPA has gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent any court from ruling on the legal merits of the Clean Power Plan.

Just as Pruitt glosses over Supreme Court precedent he doesn’t like, he also seems to have invented a Supreme Court ruling that he desires.

Pruitt’s continued claims that the Clean Power Plan is unlawful are also at odds with the views of leading legal experts – including the Attorneys General of eighteen states, former Republican Administrators of EPA under Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, and leading drafters of the Clean Air Act. They have all stood up in federal court to defend the fundamental legality of this vital climate and health safeguard.

Pruitt also took a moment in his interview with Fox News to question the health benefits associated with the Clean Power Plan – which include as many as 3,600 avoided deaths each year and thousands of avoided heart attacks and asthma attacks.

As many experts have documented, Pruitt’s EPA has deployed deceptive gimmicks to hide the consequences to human health of repealing the Clean Power Plan. Those gimmicks include assuming, contrary to the conclusions of the American Heart Association, the World Health Organization, the National Research Council, and EPA’s own scientific advisors, that there are zero benefits to reducing air pollution beyond certain levels.

Pruitt made those claims even though EPA acknowledged in its proposed repeal that the Clean Power Plan would achieve pollution reductions that would protect the health of our children.

This isn’t the first time Scott Pruitt has distorted the law and science in order to dismantle key climate and public health protections. Along with the Clean Power Plan, Pruitt has attacked pollution standards for oil and natural gas facilities, climate pollution standards for cars, and standards for heavy-duty trucks.

Americans should be outraged at Scott Pruitt’s repeated misleading statements on settled questions of law and science.

Posted in Clean Air Act, Clean Power Plan, EPA litgation, Health, News, Policy, Setting the Facts Straight / Comments are closed

The Clean Power Plan’s enormous climate benefits – in one graphic

By Ilissa Ocko / Published: October 10, 2017

In addition to the vital public health benefits it offers, the Clean Power Plan is the nation’s most significant action to date to address climate change’s number one culprit – heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions.

Now, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is trying to revoke the Clean Power Plan. Here’s a look at the enormous benefits we could lose.

When the Clean Power Plan is fully in place by 2030, the avoided annual carbon dioxide emissions relative to business-as-usual (350 million metric tons) are equivalent to preventing:

  • 40 billion gallons of gasoline consumed, or
  • 380 billion pounds of coal burned, or
  • 810 million barrels of oil consumed, or
  • 850 billion miles driven by an average car.

In order to get the same climate benefits that the Clean Power Plan would deliver, we would need to:

  • Replace 12 billion incandescent light bulbs with LEDs, or
  • Take 75 million cars off the road

Click to enlarge

 

Posted in Basic Science of Global Warming, Clean Power Plan, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, News, Science / Read 1 Response

Underhanded maneuvers to repeal the Clean Power Plan put Americans’ lives and health at risk

By Rama Zakaria / Published: October 9, 2017

(EDF’s Ben Levitan co-authored this post)

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt says he will sign a proposal tomorrow to repeal the Clean Power Plan – America’s only nationwide limits on carbon pollution from fossil fuel power plants.

If the proposal matches what we’ve already seen in a leaked draft, it would be one of the most deeply harmful and reckless actions an EPA Administrator has ever taken. It would cost thousands of American lives, harm public health in myriad other ways, and lead to years of costly delays in combating the urgent threat of climate change.

Administrator Pruitt would have to go to great lengths to obscure and ignore these harmful consequences. When EPA issued the Clean Power Plan in 2015, it estimated that the plan would create up to $54 billion in annual benefits, including:

  • The prevention of up to 3,600 premature deaths every year
  • The prevention of 90,000 childhood asthma attacks every year
  • The prevention of 300,000 missed school and work days every year.

By comparison, EPA concluded that the annual costs would be much lower. And in the two years since the Clean Power Plan was issued, new analyses – including this one from New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity – have concluded that compliance with the Clean Power Plan has become dramatically cheaper as a result of the plummeting costs of clean energy.

Yet the draft proposal for repealing the Clean Power Plan seems to rely on a significantly higher costs estimate, and much lower benefits. How is that possible?

A careful look at the numbers shows that the Administrator Pruitt’s EPA cooked the books for this proposal. They used discredited methodologies to artificially inflate costs, and to mask the consequences for our climate and obscure the thousands of lives that could be lost as a result of their repeal of the Clean Power Plan.

Here are four tactics that Administrator Pruitt has employed in the leaked proposal to inflate the costs and hide the benefits of the Clean Power Plan:

1. Disregarding lives saved by the Clean Power Plan

EPA’s original analysis of the Clean Power Plan found that it would avoid thousands of premature deaths each year by reducing particulate matter pollution – yielding up to $34 billion in annual health benefits in 2030.

According to the American Lung Association, particulate matter pollution causes permanent damage to lung development in children, aggravates asthma and other respiratory problems, increases hospitalizations, and increases deaths from heart and lung diseases including lung cancer.

The Clean Power Plan would reduce exposure to this pollution across the country – avoiding these health harms and premature deaths.

Administrator Pruitt’s draft proposal assumes away those benefits by asserting – contrary to established medical research – that there is zero health impact from reducing particulate matter pollution below certain “threshold” levels. The proposal also suggests that EPA can count only the climate benefits associated with carbon pollution, with no consideration to any health benefits at all.

This claim that there is a “threshold” level of particulate pollution below which it does not harm human health is directly contradicted by the American Heart Association and was completely discredited many years ago by an expert panel convened by EPA under the George W. Bush Administration. It also runs contrary to EPA’s long-standing practice.

As EPA itself recently explained in a court brief:

The best scientific evidence, confirmed by independent, Congressionally-mandated expert panels, is that there is no threshold level of fine particulate pollution below which health reductions are not achieved by reducing exposure.

Ignoring the deaths and harm to Americans’ health that would result from repealing the Clean Power Plan is unconscionable. The plain truth is that undoing the Clean Power Plan would deprive Americans of billions of dollars in health benefits and put then at increased risk for premature death.

2. Artificially inflating the costs of the Clean Power Plan

EPA originally anticipated that parties would comply with the Clean Power Plan in part through investments in demand-side energy efficiency, “a highly cost-effective means” for reducing carbon pollution from the power sector.

Demand-side energy efficiency measures help consumers save electricity, resulting in lower electric bills for hard-working Americans, less pollution, and a more reliable electric grid. Investments in energy efficiency are largely offset by the electricity savings that result.

Yet the upside-down accounting in the draft proposal adds those energy efficiency investments to the costs of the Clean Power Plan without deducting the electricity savings those investments yield. This makes it look like the power sector is paying for both energy efficiency and the electricity that it no longer needs to produce. Therefore, this upside-down accounting includes billions of dollars of imaginary electricity costs – for electricity that will never be generated or purchased.

The draft proposal adds the cost of this imaginary electricity to its estimate of Clean Power Plan benefits — to represent the “benefit” of not having to purchase electricity that was never produced in the first place. When comparing costs and benefits, this imaginary electricity is a net wash ­– but it enables EPA to inflate its estimate of the plan’s costs by up to $19.3 billion in 2030.

The draft proposal also uses a higher discount rate of 7 percent for energy efficiency investments – providing no meaningful justification for a choice that further inflates costs by $6.2 billion.

The cumulative effects of adding the cost of imaginary electricity and using a higher discount rate increases costs by up to $25.5 billion in 2030.

3. Shortchanging the benefits of reducing carbon pollution

Administrator Pruitt’s proposal aggressively undercuts the social cost of carbon. That’s the estimate of damages that climate pollution causes for our families and communities – from more intense hurricanes and heat waves, more wildfires, and the many other threats of climate change.

By using an unrealistically low figure, the proposal severely undervalues the benefits of the Clean Power Plan’s carbon reductions.

The original Clean Power Plan utilized an estimate of the social cost of carbon developed over many years by experts from a dozen federal agencies who used the best available science and repeatedly considered public input.

The draft proposal for repealing the Clean Power Plan has new, misleading values that use unsound methods rejected by independent experts to yield a lower estimate of the Plan’s benefits.

The draft proposal simply ignores important categories of carbon reduction benefits

The new proposal claims to count only the domestic U.S. impacts of carbon pollution, even though this pollution causes worldwide harm. A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences affirmed the importance of counting global benefits, explaining that the benefits of reducing carbon pollution would be dangerously undervalued if every country used a domestic-only social cost of carbon.

The draft proposal’s “domestic-only” cost estimate also ignores significant harms to the U.S. that arise from climate change impacts in other countries – including “global migration, economic destabilization, and political destabilization,” and “[l]ower economic growth in other regions [that] could reduce demand for U.S. exports, and lower productivity [that] could increase the prices of U.S. imports.”

For these reasons, the National Academy of Sciences concluded earlier this year that:

Climate damages to the United States cannot be accurately characterized without accounting for consequences outside U.S. borders.

Administrator Pruitt’s approach flies in the face of that expert advice.

The draft proposal short-changes our children by discounting pollution reduction benefits for future generations

The new proposal also uses a sharply lower value for the benefits that today’s carbon reductions provide to future generations.

The original Clean Power Plan “discounted” the future benefits of carbon reductions at a rate of three percent per year, based upon the findings of the inter-agency working group.

But the new proposal uses discount rates as high as seven percent, without any justification – a value that is much higher than recommended by the National Academy of Sciences or the economics literature.

The cumulative effects of ignoring global impacts and increasing the discount rate are dramatic. In the original Clean Power Plan, EPA estimated climate benefits of $20 billion in 2030 (using a three percent discount rate). The draft proposal to repeal the Clean Power Plan estimates climate benefits of just $0.5 billion in 2030.

Click to enlarge

 

4. Ignoring how low-cost clean energy means the Clean Power Plan will be even more affordable

In the two years since EPA finalized the Clean Power Plan, the plan’s goals have become even more achievable and low-cost than originally projected – thanks to electricity sector developments including the sharply declining costs of renewable energy.

But the new draft proposal has made no attempt to update its economic analysis, and does not appear to acknowledge that recent studies of the Clean Power Plan have found compliance costs are now much lower than EPA originally estimated.

Instead, Administrator Pruitt is proposing to repeal this life-saving, economically beneficial public health protection before even bothering to properly consider the latest data.

The recent report from the Institute for Policy Integrity highlights the falling costs of complying with the Clean Power Plan and points to several power sector developments that explain this trend.

The report presents several recent economic analyses conducted by independent, non-governmental entities that estimate substantially lower compliance costs than EPA projected in 2015. For instance, a June 2016 analysis by M.J. Bradley & Associates, using the same electric sector model as EPA but updating several inputs, finds that compliance would cost up to 84 percent less than EPA originally estimated.

EPA recognized and evaluated many of these precise studies as part of its Clean Power Plan deliberations. Yet for the sake of repealing the Clean Power Plan, Administrator Pruitt has decided to ignore these studies.

America deserves better

The Clean Power Plan is the most significant step the U.S. has ever taken to address the crisis of climate change. Once fully implemented, it will provide enormous public health benefits – making Americans safer, healthier, and more productive.

If Administrator Pruitt is intent on rolling back a life-saving protection for human health and the environment, the American people at least deserve an honest evaluation based on the best available data.

Unfortunately, it looks like he’s using underhanded maneuvers and deceptive accounting gimmicks to justify rescinding the Clean Power Plan instead – and the consequences for the health and safety of Americans will be all too real for decades to come.

Posted in Clean Power Plan, Economics, Energy, Health, News / Comments are closed