The EPA, CO2, Mercury Emissions, and “Green” Energy
You no doubt heard last week that on June 29 the Supreme Court invalidated an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation limiting emissions of mercury and some other pollutants from coal and oil fired electric power plants. The EPA had explicitly declared that it did not have to consider costs of the regulation, and the Court informed them that was not so. When its regulation will cost individuals and companies many billions of dollars a year, the Court held that the agency should produce some kind of cost-benefit analysis, Nevertheless, the Court is leaving how the EPA accounts for cost completely up to them. Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion stated,
We need not and do not hold that the law unambiguously required the Agency … to conduct a formal cost-benefit analysis in which each advantage and disadvantage is assigned a monetary value. It will be up to the Agency to decide (as always, within the limits of reasonable interpretation) how to account for cost.
All the EPA will have to do to reinstate their regulation is issue some kind of study that formally fulfills the requirement for a cost-benefit analysis.
It is very hard to see how the EPA could ever say that the benefits of their rule would outweigh the costs. If it were objective and truthful, the EPA would have to confess that the costs were far higher than the benefits. In what analysis they have done, the EPA claimed that the regulation would cost power plant operators $9.6 billion annually, while reduction in hazardous air pollutants would save individuals from $4 million to $6 million per year in lower health costs. A very large difference, the cost to benefit ratio is between 1600 to 1 to 2800 to 1. To put lipstick on the pig, the EPA claimed some ancillary benefits for reducing sulfur dioxide and particulate emissions that are not covered under current air pollution legislation. They said this reduction would be worth between $37 billion and $90 billion annually. These pollutants have been steadily reduced over the decades to such an extent that it is questionable how accurate the EPA’s benefits analysis is.
I must admit to a certain suspicion that the main reason the EPA is insisting on tighter regulations of these various pollutants is to drive fossil fuel fired power plants out of existence in order to reduce CO2 emissions. This is a suspicion apparently shared by others (see here and here and here and here). Since coal provides about 40% of the nation’s electrical power, any attempt to eliminate it over a short period of time would cause a lot of economic pain. The primary motivation for closing all these plants appears to be the idea that mankind is causing the globe to warm up by emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This idea has become something of a religion among the Left. This despite the fact that there has been no global warming since the late 1990s while the CO2 densities have continued to increase. Green house gas warming is clearly not the only thing going on in the atmosphere.
On the day after the Supreme Court ruled on the EPA’s regulation, President Obama announced a goal of generating 20% of the nation’s electricity from wind and solar power by 2030. If this were practical, it would be conceivable we could partially transition from coal to these “green energy” sources over that time period. Unfortunately, such a transition does not seem to be at all practical using either current or any foreseeable technology. As Microsoft’s Bill Gates told the Financial Times, current “green” technologies could provide energy in place of coal at a “beyond astronomical” cost. Since he is a believer in man-made global warming, he wants to stimulate research to find an economic way of solving the problem. To further this end, he is willing to hazard $2 billion of his $80 billion fortune for basic research.
As an example of the problems, Mr. Gates spoke of solar power, saying
Solar is only during the day, solar only works best in places where it’s warm. We don’t have perfect grids. We don’t have storage. There’s no battery technology that’s even close to allowing us to take all of our energy from renewables and be able to use battery storage in order to deal not only with the 24-hour cycle but also with long periods of time where it’s cloudy and you don’t have sun or you don’t have wind.
In short, we do not at the present time have the capability to provide day-long electrical power from “green” sources. Perhaps, some day we will find the technology. It is quite possible we will not. Wind power, on the other hand, depends on both the location and the weather, and seems condemned to play a small, high-cost role, no matter what the technology. Engineers working for Google have independently come to the same conclusions.
In the meantime, until we actually possess alternative energy technology, we would be beyond foolish and reckless (try the adjective “insane”) to start closing down our coal-fired electrical power plants.
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