I have to admit I am confused.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the EPA, bowing to political pressure, is going to ease up on some emissions handcuffs it slapped on power plants in July.
The federal agency reported in an early July press release:
On July 6, 2011, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule that protects the health of millions of Americans by helping states reduce air pollution and attain clean air standards. This rule, known as the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR), requires 27 states to significantly improve air quality by reducing power plant emissions that contribute to ozone and/or fine particle pollution in other states.
This rule replaces EPA's 2005 Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR). A December 2008 court decision kept the requirements of CAIR in place temporarily but directed EPA to issue a new rule to implement Clean Air Act requirements concerning the transport of air pollution across state boundaries. This action responds to the court's concerns.
According to the Journal, EPA will increase allowed emissions from 1 to 4 percent over the July standards.
I talked to Lisa Jackson about the standards in an article in the current issue of EnergyBiz.: http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/energycentral/energybiz_20110910/
Jackson, the EPA administrator, told me the rule made huge economic sense. Here is her equation. It would cost $2.8 billion a year to implement but would save $120 billion to $290 billion a year in health costs by 2014 when the rule was to be fully in place. That is because it would lessen smog-related emisssions that harm our health and prevent 34,000 emissions-related deaths. The power industry has said that the restrictions were costly and too aggressively scheduled and it needed more time to comply.
The thing I wonder about EPA is this. The EPA had no problem trotting out its projections that the full standards would save us as much as $300 billion a year in costs tied to premature deaths, heart attacks, bronchitis, asthma and emergency room visits when it was trying to overcome opposition to its plans.
But when it gets ready to retreat on those standards - as it apparently now is - you don't see them saying, "The EPA has decided to soften the impact of these measures on utilities and, by the way, the trade off will be $10 billion a year in otherwise avoidable asthma cases and $20 billion a year in heart attacks."
Well, of course, it is all a matter of marketing.
The science of these standards is probably more elusive than proving that man is or is not responsible for global warming.
What is the precise level of ozones we should strive for? There is no magic number. What makes sense is to encourage the power companies to ratchet back emissions - spur development of new technologies to make that happen - and minimize the economic consequences to the utilities and their customers.
Throwing around arguable health impact numbers just adds to the smog.
I am as equally confused as yourself! In essence, I see this as an excellent example of hype, pure and simple. However, what I find far more significant is the third sentence in the second to last paragraph of your post, and I quote:
"What makes sense is to encourage the power companies to ratchet back emissions – spur development of new technologies to make that happen – and minimize the economic consequences to the utilities and their customers".
Spur development of new technologies ... Yes, of course, but how?
In the absence of meaningful dialogue between the likely creators of such technologies (scientists and engineers) and those who head up the power companies (the decision makers driving those companies) this will just not happen.
I know of one such case, and I sincerely hope that it is one of only a few, where there is a technology available and ready to go. Proof of concept, basic engineering, and practical laboratory tests are all complete, but the project is just languishing there, waiting to be moved on to the next stage.
One reason for this lack of enthusiasm appears to rest on the possibility that so few people understand that, once the mathematics are published or otherwise disclosed and results can be independently confirmed, the technology under consideration becomes independent from its originators. The latter exercise is subject, of course, to due and proper acknowledgement of source.
One solution to the foregoing would be to transfer everything to China. This would lead to the reduction of GHG emissions, if nothing else, but is this what we really want?
Alan E. Belcher.
With the incrasing politicization of the regulatory agencies, there is a trend to try to realize an administration's vision through regulation. In the case of the EPA, they are not willing to come right out and admit that the regulations are designed to advance the administration's visions of clean energy, so they invent economic arguments to justify their actions.
Climate science alone is dificult for people to understand. They have difficulty with spending milions of dollars today to achieve billions in benefits in 50 years when those predicting the benefits can not tell us with any better than 50/50 accuracy if it will rain next Tuesday. The billions in health benefits are even more difficult to understand. However, the thousands of dollars in increased taxes, electric rates, and product prices are very real to everyone.
The administration and, by extension, the EPA started out with a grand vision for clean energy. However, now that reality has sunk in and it has become evident that the country can not afford that grand vision they are having to dial back their ambitions to something more affordable. Since they initially justified their actions with with economic arguments, they have to stick to economic arguments for dialing back. With the uncertainty in the benefit estimates discussed above, a 100/1 benefit/cost ratio can easily becme a 10/1 ratio, justifying a reduction in regulatiory restrictions.
No confusion here.
Dave
Since that time I've heard and read several different versions of the health impacts set forth by the EPA, none of which are consistent with each other. There are no 3rd party sources cited for validation. It appears to me that the EPA is fabricating so-called facts on the fly to justify their goals.
I have tried diligently to locate the source of the health claims. The science behind the EPA claims is hidden. The EPA website does not post links to major studies, and the links they do provide are links to summaries of studies very little of which is directly applicable. Most of these summaries are funded by the EPA and digging further reveals a great deal of self-editing as any equivocation in the underlying study is conveniently not mentionned.
If there are legitimate health impacts, these are not well documented or they would be available. I take lack of evidence to mean either no studies have been done (in which case they should be done in advance of proposing policy), or that the available studies are inconclusive, which should be another reason to hold back on destructive policies.
The EPA has totally discredited itself in my mind. I'm not confused either.
History teaches, however, that such rules are likely to have far less dire consequences than their opponents predict. For example, many companies and trade associations assured us that the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 and the associated cap and trade program for SO2 emissions would be an almost insurmountable hurdle to economic prosperity. Those predictions turned out to be far off the mark. EPA's rules (and other factors) spurred important improvements in technology, e.g., more efficient gas turbines, large-scale combined cycle electric generation, and improved energy efficiency of appliances. These improvements, along with the compliance-driven development of cost-effective emission control systems, made the costs of complying with the 1990 amendments, I submit, almost unnoticeable in our everyday lives. I find two lessons in this history: First, don't get too excited about the numbers on either side of EPA's c/b equations, because they all are probably way too high. Second, rules like this are what drive innovative technologies. Two cases in point: (1) Largely because of California's strict tailpipe emissions standards, we have 50+ MPG cars like the Toyota Prius. (2) We have not put a price or other limitations on GHG emissions, and carbon sequestration technology has gone nowhere.
A more legitimate question about the Cross-State rule may be the compliance deadline. Since we have waited years for this rule, is it really necessary to make it effective almost immediately? From a purely legal standpoint, EPA's implementation date is defensible, since it is responding to a court order to replace rules that were determined to be unlawful. From a practical standpoint, why not at least ask the court of appeals that retains jurisdiction to permit implementation in 2013 instead? The answer to that, of course, lies in the calendar. Better to put the new rule into effect early in 2012, and let it disappear from the headlines before the final months of the presidential campaign, than to have it looming over everyone on Election Day. Like it or not, that's the approach that any administration of any party would take in the same circumstances.