Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt announced he would sign a proposed rule to repeal the centerpiece of former President Barack Obama’s plan to fight global warming.
Pruitt announced his intention to withdraw the Clean Power Plan (CPP) to applause from a crowd gathered at a mining event on Monday. EPA has been working to repeal the CPP for months.
The Obama administration finalized the CPP in 2015, which aims to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Obama used the CPP as part of his plant to meet the goals of the Paris climate accord.
The CPP, however, never went into full effect. The U.S. Supreme Court issued an unprecedented stay against the rule in early 2016.
Draft EPA plans to repeal and possibly replace the CPP have already leaked to the media. EPA says repealing the rule will save Americans $33 billion in compliance costs.
The Obama administration claimed the CPP would only cost $8.4 billion and deliver public health and climate benefits ranging from $14 to $34 billion by 2030.
EPA won’t propose a replacement to the CPP in its proposal, according to draft plans. The agency may issue a separate rule, asking for comments on what could replace the CPP.
“The EPA has not determined whether it will promulgate a rule under section 111(d) to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from existing EGUs, and, if it will do so, when it will do so and what form that rule will take,” reads the draft.
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This article originally appeared in The Daily Caller
why do you need to “fight” a contrived problem that hasn’t been proven to exist?
Great news!
What a coward Pruitt is.
Coal employs far fewer people than green tech in the US by a factor at about 10. Green jobs are growing 17 times faster than any other sector in the US, they are widely distributed geographically and they pay more.
There is a rapidly dwindling demand for coal around the world.
Mining coal kills miners either now in accidents or later with black lung etc.
Mining causes tons of local pollution.
Burning coal releases tons of particulates that cause lung disease and aggravate symptoms for suffers if asthma.
Coal particulates that travel away to any glaciated areas settle on the ice and cause faster melting by soaking up more sunlight.
Burning coal releases sulphur into the air that is also bad for human health and that then falls as acid rain.
Burning coal is the most CO2 intensive form of power generation.
Miners and burners of coal pay little or nothing for the external harms they cause.
YAY, more coal please!!!
MR you say there is a dwindling demand for coal , FALSE more coal is being burnt than ever . CO2 is a wonderful fertilizer , I hope the 400 ppm will climb to 8oo ppm . Your belief system will do more harm to your health than coal particulates .
On coal demand, you are factually wrong. There was an uptick for Asia but that is over and total demand is now falling.
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/coal/coal-
consumption.html
US consumption has been falling since 1980
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_States#/media/File%3AUS_Electrical_Generation_1949-2011.png
As for CO2 being a fertiliser, this is idiotic. The limiting factor on plant growth is not CO2, its nitrates and water availability. That why we put nitrogen fertiliser and water on crop, not pump CO2 all over them.
You don’t have to predict anything to see what happens when there are 800pm of CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s known from the geological record. Temperatures rise, deserts form, ice melts and sea levels rise.
Knee cap that pseudo science! Atta boy!!!
What, that miners get long term sick and die from working down mines for years? that mining is responsible for more deaths per unit of energy output than any other form of generation? That soot particulates from burning coal significantly raise rates of asthma and lung disease near coal power plants?
Grr, it’s just such stupid policy. Hardly anyone benefits. Everyone else loses and it’s for a tiny handful of jobs that are in decline anyway. It not the clean power plan that’s killing coal. It’s market forces. It will be gone soon anyway. Why give it support when the money and effort could go to the US getting ahead with the tech of the future. China is doing solar at such huge scale there is no way the US will be able to compete if this is the governments attitude. This kind of crap makes the US less competitive long term.
If solar is so profitable, then would it require any subsidies? Last time I looked the market worked really well at choosing winners. You know, Apple doesn’t need any help from Washington D.C.
The only thing that “renewable” energy does is increase the cost of my utility bills. It’s a Ponzi scheme and a scam.
I don’t think you know what a Ponzi scheme is. It’s a very specific kind of fraud. The energy market bears no relationship to a Ponzi scheme.
Fossil fuels may have lower direct costs but they have high external costs like to public health. This not only hurts people, it costs you money in you health insurance or government compensation schemes.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/justingerdes/2013/04/08/how-much-do-health-impacts-from-fossil-fuel-electricity-cost-the-u-s-economy/amp/
And then you have defence spending. The Iraq war was mainly about securing a cheap reliable oil supply. That cost the US taxpayer $2 Trillion.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSBRE92D0PG20130314
And I’m only just getting started. That excluded costs to contaminated land, deaths injuries and long term sickness of miners themselves, and of course, the costs of the environmental damage of climate change.
So you are massively subsiding coal, oil and gas, just indirectly.
As for Apple and picking winners, supporting technology is not supporting specific companies. Apple became wildly successful due to the iPhone. Guess what. Every single core technology in the iPhone was either partly or completely created in the public sector by the government or government funded research. The implicit subsidy for government in the iPhone is in the Trillions of dollars. There would have been no iPhone without government funded research.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04hyzm5
Every nuclear power plant ever built has had vast public subsidies poured into it. And that tech is 60 years old now! Did you go to the barricades about that?
Solar, wind and other forms of renewable generation will end up cheaper in direct cost terms vs fossil fuels soon enough. The question is do you want to buy them from US companies or Chinese and European ones.
You are a wonderful example of a misinformed snowflake millennial who doesn’t have a clue about the real world.
Check out this discussion:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/10/11/claim-renewables-are-the-cheapest-form-of-power/
I wish I was a millennial! A bit long in the tooth for that. I obviously cant compete with your knowledge of the real world oh wise one.
The article you sent me was a review of reports that renewables were already cheaper than fossil fuels and politics was the only problem. According to the last report I read in the Economist on the subject the situation is more complicated than just theoretical price of generation of say onshore wind vs coal or gas, due to issues around storage and intermittency. When the wind blows, wind energy is effectively free but it doesn’t always blow… i do understand that. So I don’t expect everything to go to renewables overnight as clearly a huge amount of new infrastructure is required to store energy and distribute power long distances. And in the meantime lots of power sources are needed.
But the stupid thing about scrapping the Clean Power Plan is that it’s plainly a political gesture. It won’t bring back coal jobs in even the medium term. They have been lost mainly due to cheap gas from fracking anyway. It just relaxes a load of sensible environmental constrainsts on the dirtiest fuel available.
all trees and our food crops needs co2 to breath lowering co2 is choking our trees and food crops, next they will ban or tax soda and beer because of co2 gas.
co2 is a heavy gas it lays low like a co2 fire extinguisher smothers a fire staying low
The plants seemed to be doing fine for the past few thousand years at 280ppm of CO2. If they need more then why didn’t farmers pump CO2 all over their crops instead of using nitrogen fertiliser?
And there is this thing called wind. It gets the atmosphere mixed up. If you think the CO3 should settle out then why doesn’t the oxygen and nitrogen? They have different densities as well.
Please stop believing these myths. They don’t bear any scrutiny at all.
If you could get nuclear as cheap as renewables, and build stations in less than a couple of decades that always come late and over budget, and you had a solution for the extremely dangerous waste, then yes, fine.
And must people move to avoid a polluting power station? And and why should you want Americans to go into jobs that are dangerous, both into the short term and long term? There are alternatives that avoid all these problems.
And presumably you would like to go back to a world of lead in petrol, mo seat belts in cars and high levels of smoking as well right?