A few days ago, in advance of last Monday's announcement by the Obama Administration of proposed new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emissions rules for the nation's coal-fired power plants, I was getting myself mentally lathered-up to write about the inevitable poorly-founded Republican and special-interest opposition to such a worthy ground-breaking initiative.
As it turns out, I was wasting my time. Here's why: These proposed new regulations are, unfortunately, not very challenging; in fact, it's hard to call them ground-breaking. The 30% reduction in carbon emissions called for by the proposed new EPA regulations can be achieved by the power generation industry if they just simply keep on doing what they have already been doing.
Accomplishing a 30% emissions reduction in the next 15 years--the proposed regulations are not immediately effective, as the process requires a one-year period of commentary and revisions first--doesn't seem very challenging to me; when you do the math, it probably doesn't seem that challenging to you, either.
But, it's even easier than it would seem after doing the math. Why? you might ask. Because, I would answer, the baseline year is not 2014 or 2015, but instead it is 2005, and in the last nine years these emissions have already been reduced by about half of the target of 30%! So, according to the regulations as they are currently proposed, the power generation industry must accomplish over the next fifteen years about the same as they have accomplished during the last nine years. In other words, they need to accomplish a 15% reduction over a period of 15 years, when they've already done the same in 9 years.
If America's taipans of power can't do that by just getting out of bed in the morning and going to work, then we need new taipans.
Yes, I realize there are lots of moving pieces that affect power generation. For example, it's been relatively easy over the last few years to replace thermal coal with natural gas because of the emergence of relatively inexpensive natural gas as an alternative fuel, which offsets the costs of plant conversion. And then there's the argument that plays so well in all of those coal-mining states: Coal means jobs!
The economic reality, of course, is brutally in favor of continuing to reduce the use of thermal coal for a couple of reasons. First, natural gas is abundant; even the most conservative estimates of America's natural gas resources speak in terms of supplies that can last for centuries. Second, the labor part of the business of extracting and delivering coal is dirty, dangerous and undesirable; over the next decade-and-a-half, most of the people involved in that labor will either die, retire or engage in more agreeable employment.
Bear in mind the fact that coal miners have been passing away, retiring or moving to better jobs for the last nine years as the power industry has been reducing its reliance on coal. If the numerical impact on that labor force is proportional to the change in need for its product--seems like a reasonable assumption to me--then changes that have happened over nine years will now be spread out over fifteen years, thus making for more manageable changes in the overall employment environment.
I think these things by themselves close the case in an economic sense, even without adding in the economic, emotional, mental and human benefits of a population that will enjoy better health.
We need the proposed new EPA regulations; without them, there's nothing to nudge the power industry to make further improvements in their operations that will mean cleaner air for us to look through and breath into our lungs. If it were up to me, we would be doing more. . .but that's a conversation for another time.
The effort I first spent on this wasn't entirely wasted; I'm still using the same title, because I think it's a good one.
For those who are interested, what follows is the original, lathered-up version.
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You would think that it would be relatively easy for Americans to agree that breathing polluted air is bad, and acting to remove pollution is good. We decided this decades ago, with bipartisan agreement from both major political parties--Democratic and Republican--as well as most of the minor parties.
It seems that some people have forgotten this and so they want to waste good air--presumably they wouldn't want to suck up bad air since that would send them into fits of coughing or worse--by objecting to the next expected step in further reducing airborne pollution, which is to begin the process of putting a stake through the heart of King Coal.
The squeamish among America's political class--admittedly and shamefully, this includes some Democrats, but mostly it's Republicans--feverishly chant that this is "Obama's war on coal!" They understate the reality. It's a war on a power-generating substance which has reigned supreme with disguised malevolence for two centuries. The combustion of which corrupts our air, land and water with chemicals which are inimical to all higher forms of life on Earth, including--and especially--the bipedal life forms known as homo sapiens sapiens; that's us. Don't call it simply coal; call it King Coal, because it has powered the furnaces and generators and engines needed by a developing and growing civilization for generations. Yes, we needed it, and so we willingly gave our fealty while basking in the protective warmth of those furnaces. But King Coal has always deceived us about the costs of our feudal relationship. The price of living under King Coal's protection is more than what we could see we were paying for discovery, extraction, transportation and combustion. Much more.
We've already had the debate about the not so obvious costs of a dirty environment, and the importance and values of a cleaner living environment, starting in the 1950s, gaining clarity in the '60s--remember Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring?"--and then the decision being decisively awarded in the early '70s with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the federal government by the Republican Administration of Richard Nixon and the Democratic-majority House and Senate. The Clean Air Act legislation was a companion product to the formation of the EPA. Seems like a pretty solid piece of bipartisan commitment to me.
Which brings us to the here-and-now, with the Obama Administration set to announce soon a set of reduction actions, under the authority of the Clean Air Act, that must be taken over the next several years by coal-fired electricity plants. Already, the Chamber of Commerce and other similar special-interest groups, and their bought-and-paid-for anti-environmental politicians, have objected to these actions by saying that they are too expensive--they peg the cost at $50 billion annually, which they somehow figured out before the program has been announced--and that jobs will be lost if the actions are taken.
If these people who oppose the next steps needed to clean the environment know what they are talking about, then they sure are doing a good job of hiding that fact.
First of all, let's assume that the $50 billion figure is accurate, which is just an assumption. In a $17 trillion economy, $50 billion is hardly even a rounding error. But the whole discussion is pointless, because it will take time to figure out these numbers. The fact that these people are throwing figures like this around even before the program is announced is just evidence that they don't want to engage in a fact-based discussion.
The same holds true for any commentary on job losses. I don't doubt that reducing the use of coal will cause some coal mining jobs to go away. That's not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it even an event that will have an adverse effect on the people who currently hold those jobs. Coal mining is dangerous, dirty and unhealthy work; that's the kind of employment that ought to decrease over time.
In fact, many of today's jobs related to the finding, extraction and transportation of coal are going to be around for a good amount of time yet. Reducing coal usage will not take place overnight, and normal employment attrition might well balance the books as coal-related job opportunities fade away.
I wish we could do without the use of coal entirely, because I believe we would all be better off for doing so. That's not going to happen soon, certainly not in the next few decades. But the new EPA regulations point us in the right direction.
