This year the House passed Waxman-Markey, the first attempt by the federal government to begin addressing global warming and greenhouse gas emissions. Good news, right? Not so fast. Much like health care, the bill’s effectiveness has been watered down by industry, in this case the coal industry. CoalSwarm editor Kaethin Prizer lays out how the bill offers a stable and subsidized future for coal despite its large and harmful emissions, and how we can challenge our representatives at this crucial stage to move the bill away from coal. Given increasingly alarming reports of the harm global warming is doing and will do to the planet, the urgency in reshaping the bill before it is too late cannot be overstated.
A Whole Lot of Coal Going On:
The Climate Bill Rolls Over for the
Coal Industry
By Kaethin Prizer
OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2009 CONDUCIVE
Congress is allowing the coal industry to dictate the terms of the legislation, so that coal, rather than renewable energy or even cleaner-burning natural gas, remains the energy of choice.
Conducive readers are probably aware of the June 26 passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) by the House of Representatives. Sponsored by Henry Waxman (D-California) and Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts), the bill was offered as “a comprehensive approach to America’s energy policy that charts a new course toward a clean energy economy.” The legislation has a number of components, including a renewable electricity standard that requires 20 percent of electricity to come from renewable fuels by 2025; incentives for the development of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies; a “cap and trade” program for carbon emissions; requirements to reduce America’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 83 percent by 2050; higher energy efficiency standards for buildings, lighting, and appliances; smart grid and electrical car provisions; and green job creation. By most counts this is a groundbreaking bill, the first major step towards federal mandates to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and reduce our dangerously high levels of global warming emissions.
Unfortunately, though, there’s a major problem with the legislation that must be remedied if it is to have a significant impact on the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions: ACES contains massive giveaways to coal interests, a fossil fuel that has directly contributed to this hot mess of a changing climate we have on our hands. Coal-fired power plants currently generate about half the electricity in the United States and over a third of the carbon dioxide emissions – 2,162 million metric tons of CO2 in 2007 according to the Energy Information Administration. Citing coal’s abundance and high carbon concentration, NASA’s chief climate scientist James Hansen continues to advocate that stopping emissions from coal-fired power plants is “80% of the solution to the global warming crisis.” The situation is critical: not only are we already seeing signs of climate change at a rate much more rapid than anticipated, but scientists are also warning that without significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades, we may incite runaway warming beyond our control, as melting permafrost releases high concentrations of the GHG methane into the atmosphere. Yet somehow Congress is allowing the coal industry to dictate the terms of the legislation, so that coal, rather than renewable energy or even cleaner-burning natural gas, remains the energy of choice. The Senate is about to embark on its own round of debating and amending, making it a crucial time to take a closer look at a bill that is supposedly designed to promote renewable energy and mitigate the greenhouse gas pollution that is endangering our planet.
The bill also allows capped sources, including power plants, to increase their carbon emissions by up to two billion tons each year.
As so often happens in Washington, winning enough votes to pass the Waxman-Markey bill involved a whole lot of rewriting and rule changing, much of which was on the pro-coal front. Representative Rick Boucher, a Democrat representing Virginia coal country, even touted his own negotiating skills for scoring wins on behalf of his coal backers. United Mine Workers of America International President Cecil E. Roberts also hailed the changes, saying that some had followed from recommendations by the Union itself. His statement included both praise and foreshadowing: “Rep. Boucher and others in Congress have fought hard to protect the interests of coal miners and all working families. We look forward to working closely with him as the legislation moves through the legislative process.” It should be noted that even though coal companies like to tout job creation and economic development, in fact the wind industry alone surpassed coal mining jobs in 2008, and a new study shows that renewable energies could create 2.7 million more jobs worldwide by 2030, including almost 400,000 in the United States, than would staying the course with coal. Yet coal enjoys vastly higher government subsidies than other energy sources, and ACES will only continue that trend. Even the Natural Gas industry was taken by surprise at the coal industry’s red carpet treatment and has had to step up its lobbying efforts to try to get some of the action.
So what are the giveaways? They are numerous. To begin with, Representatives Waxman and Markey agreed to ease the bill’s mandates for near-term emissions reductions and increase assistance to polluters to help them meet these targets. Near-term targets for emissions reductions were decreased from 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, to 17 percent reductions over the same period. Some coal state legislators are now saying they want these mandates weakened even more. The coal industry hopes the lowered targets will give them more time to implement carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies – for which ACES allots $1 billion each year for the next ten years to fund development. The highly questionable viability of carbon sequestration technology has been discussed in depth in many other places, so I’ll avoid a ranting detour about it here. Just keep in mind that this technology is in its nascent stages at best – it has never been tested on a large scale, and even industry experts estimate that it won’t be commercially available until at least 2020. Jim Rogers, the head of Duke Energy, recently expressed doubt about the feasibility of CCS. By Rogers’ calculations, storing just 20 percent of carbon emissions – nowhere near the goal of 85 percent or more – would require ten cubic miles over the life of a single coal-fired power plant: “That’s a lot of football fields,” he said. Yet much of the climate bill treats the successful implementation of carbon sequestration as a sure thing, and bases the wellbeing of future generations on its ability to effectively eliminate carbon emissions from coal plants. Even if CCS does prove viable – emphasis on if – the coal industry is going to spend at least the next decade emitting vast amounts of carbon dioxide, while research and demonstration projects plod along with outcome unknown.
While plants that begin the permitting process after January 1, 2009 will be required to halve their carbon emissions by 2025, the bill mandates no such site-specific reductions for America’s fleet of 600+ aging plants.
Then there are the allowances slated to be issued to polluting companies, and the offsets that help utilities skirt emissions targets. ACES establishes a program of tradeable emissions allowances, or permits, modeled after the Clean Air Act system, which was designed to prevent acid rain. Originally President Obama had wanted all of the emissions permits to be auctioned off, but the bill now gives away 80 percent of them for free until 2025 – another compromise deemed necessary to ensure passage of the bill. According to EPA and Congressional Budget Office estimates, the total value of the allowances will be approximately $70 to $80 billion in 2015 dollars. With the largest share of free allowances going to electric utilities, that’s quite a gift to the coal industry and a lot of lost revenue for the federal government and the programs it was supposed to fund – in part, protecting consumers from increasing energy prices and advancing clean energy projects and energy efficiency programs. As for the emissions offsets, the bill also allows capped sources, including power plants, to increase their carbon emissions by up to 2 billion tons each year by investing in domestic or international projects that reduce a corresponding amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This means that utility companies can take various actions, such as planting some trees in the United States or funding renewable energy projects in third world countries, as a way to keep polluting. Some studies have suggested that these offset provisions could enable U.S. emissions to actually increase through 2030. Not only does this system defeat the purpose of having caps to begin with, but it creates huge issues about regulation and enforcement. Congress will have to develop a methodology of ensuring that so-called offsets are actually effective and equivalent in the amounts of global warming gases they counteract. Economists Steven Stoft and Daniel Kirshner have described the system as a “carbon protection racket,” and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has expressed concerns about its potential to be manipulated with fraudulent claims of emissions reductions.
But wait – we haven’t even touched on one of the most alarming parts of the bill: instead of mandating the phase-out of old plants, all plants permitted by 2009 are effectively grandfathered in. This means that while plants that begin the permitting process after January 1, 2009 will be required to halve their carbon emissions by 2025, the bill mandates no such site-specific reductions for America’s fleet of 600+ aging plants. And what about the coal plants with early-stage permits that are currently under construction in the United States? Waxman and Markey had intended for the regulations to apply to these new plants, specifying that those “finally” permitted after January 1, 2009 were included; instead, that language was changed to “initially” – meaning that 43 plants currently in development have no direct requirements to reduce their CO2 emissions. These stipulations repeat the same mistake made by the 1977 Clean Air Act, which exempted old plants from having to install best available pollution control technologies. Although lawmakers expected older plants to be retired as a matter of course, instead the regulations had the opposite effect. Utility companies found it in their best financial interests to keep the plants in service longer, as opposed to building new plants and incurring the extra costs of pollution control equipment. ACES risks the same outcome. By offering free emissions permits and allowing carbon offsets for existing plants, the bill could give utilities an incentive to keep older, dirtier plants running instead of developing new facilities that meet its cost-intensive stipulations. Given that about 70 percent of the United State’s generation capacity for coal-fired electricity comes from plants built before 1980, that’s a risk that significantly jeopardizes our changing climate.
Even the EPA predicts that conventional coal-fired power plants (i.e., the kind without carbon sequestration) will expand under the provisions of the Waxman-Markey bill.
And as the cherry on top of Big Coal’s winnings, the bill also strips the EPA of its ability to regulate greenhouse gases. In Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court ruled that the under the Clean Air Act, the EPA must regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases if it finds these gases endanger public health and welfare. In April of this year, the EPA issued its landmark Endangerment Finding, officially declaring greenhouse gases a danger to public health and taking the first step towards creating official limits on global warming pollution. It seemed the Obama administration was sweeping aside the dark, pro-industry days of the Bush administration, during which the EPA was unwilling to move forward on the Supreme Court ruling. The pendulum seemed ready to swing back to the side of environmental protection and public welfare. But unfortunately Sections 831-835 of the Waxman-Markey legislation negate the Supreme Court finding and rescind the EPA’s efforts by prohibiting any greenhouse gas from being listed as a “criteria pollutant” or “hazardous air pollutant” on the basis of its impact on climate change. The bill also exempts greenhouse gas emissions from being considered in New Source Review, a process established with the Clean Air Act that essentially requires utility companies to install modern pollution controls when building new plants or expanding existing facilities. Thus, among other negative implications of removing the EPA’s oversight of greenhouse gas pollution, the switch makes it even more difficult to address the problem of existing plants. Not only is the current fleet of CO2-spewing facilities largely exempted from the Waxman-Markey regulations, but the bill also takes away most of the EPA’s authority to step in and limit carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act
So there you have it: a so-called Climate Bill that, for all intents and purposes, ensures that the most offending fossil fuel will continue its dominance for decades to come. Even the EPA predicts that conventional coal-fired power plants (i.e., the kind without carbon sequestration) will expand under the provisions of the Waxman-Markey bill. And perhaps it should come as little surprise: since 2008, the coal mining and electric utility industries have spent over $250 million lobbying Congress to delay climate change legislation. Discussing the coal industry’s influence on the legislation, Dr. Hansen said:
“…they have been enormously effective in their impact on the politics, even though the truth is it’s not that big an industry, and the total number of employees is not that large. But they are very powerful in terms of the number of senators and representatives they are able to influence, and apparently even the administration. It doesn’t make sense from an overall national perspective to give them such tremendous political clout. It is not in the best interest of the nation or the public.”
The rest of the legislation isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination: among other issues, the reduction targets are too low, the renewable standards too weak. But the kickbacks to the coal industry are unconscionable in a bill that is supposed to take substantive action on global warming and reduce our destructive devotion to fossil fuels.
As the cherry on top of Big Coal’s winnings, the bill also strips the EPA of its ability to regulate greenhouse gases.
There is no question that Representatives Waxman and Markey deserve our praise for introducing legislation to advance clean energy and address global climate change. But there are serious defects in this bill, industry freebies that drastically undermine efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions. There is a very good likelihood that a climate bill won’t pass the Senate, or that if it does, it will have so many new provisions that the House will object. But the United States is already way behind the curve, and we need to take action on global warming – we just need to get it right and stop kowtowing to polluting industries. Our leaders in Washington must move past ‘business as usual’ and enact legislation that is in the best interests of the citizens who elected them rather than the industries that lobby them.
What you can do:
- Write your Senators and urge them to strengthen the legislation, then ask your friends and family to do the same.
- The Sierra Club has a sign-on letter calling out the shortcomings of the bill in relation to existing coal plants.
- Public Citizen offers another that targets the $70 billion+ allowances slated to be doled out for free to energy companies.
- Californians, contact the office of Barbara Boxer, who is co-sponsoring the Senate’s own version of a climate bill. You can call or write one of her local offices, or email her using this form.
- Get involved! Take part in 350.org’s upcoming International Day of Action on October 24 to call attention to the need for immediate and strong action on climate change. There are already upwards of a 1,000 actions planned in the United States leading up to the December climate change meetings in Copenhagen, where an estimated 189 countries will finalize a new version of the Kyoto Protocol.
Kaethin Prizer is the editor of CoalSwarm, a collaborative information clearinghouse on U.S. and international coal mines, plants, companies, politics, impacts, and alternatives.
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