Clean Power Plan – No Fricking Fracking

Court paves path for Biden on power plant climate rule

Politico: Court paves path for Biden on power plant climate rule. The incoming Biden administration is likely to use the court’s ruling to justify returning to something resembling the Clean Power Plan.

President-elect Joe Biden’s EPA could have significant legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide from power plants after a federal court on Tuesday struck down one of the Trump administration’s biggest climate change rule rollbacks.

The split-panel opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for the first time offers a binding judicial opinion on the statutory scope of EPA’s regulatory powers on greenhouse gases.

Biden will launch his presidency on Wednesday with the most ambitious climate change plan ever sought by a White House, and the new ruling will make it easier for his administration to create rules that help drive the nation’s power grid toward net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2035, a goal that Biden has laid out.

DeSmog Blog, Week of June 21, 2019

This week’s set of articles discuss:

Trump Makes His Biggest Move Yet to Try to Save Coal Plants

This Bloomberg article discusses how Trump is trying to save coal plants. EPA scales back Obama’s Clean Power Plan curbs on emissions while solar, wind and natural gas have pared U.S. coal demand.

President Donald Trump is scaling back sweeping Obama-era curbs on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants burning coal, his biggest step yet to fulfill his campaign promise to stop a “war” on the fossil fuel.

Yet the Environmental Protection Agency’s rewrite of the Clean Power Plan, which was signed Wednesday in Washington, will do little to halt a nationwide shift away from coal and toward cheaper electricity generated by wind, sun and natural gas.

Trump’s climate ‘plan’ is finally here, and it’s already headed to court

This Grist article discusses Trump’s climate ‘plan’ and it’s already headed to court.

The Trump administration just placed a nail in the coffin of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which had for the first time required states to set goals aimed at reducing carbon emissions coming from power plants. Today the Environmental Protection Agency finalized its replacement of the CPP: the Affordable Clean Energy rule. The new plan isn’t as ambitious, only requiring individual plants to produce fewer emissions per megawatt of electricity.

The move to scrap the CPP wasn’t unexpected — the EPA announced it was crafting an alternative back in 2017. Finalizing the new rule is just the latest attempt by the president to throw a lifeline to the country’s ailing coal industry, which supports the new rule. But that doesn’t mean the change didn’t cause a stir among advocates who see it as a setback for Americans’ health and the environment.

Had Obama’s power plan ever gone into effect (it was issued in 2015 but never implemented due to court challenges), it would have reduced greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to taking 70 percent of the country’s passenger vehicles off the road. The CPP was largely aimed at reigning in the U.S.’ contribution to global warming, though it would have come with important co-benefits like improving air quality. The EPA estimated that the plan would have prevented 4,500 deaths connected to air pollution each year.

Report: How Much Would Trump’s Climate Rule Rollbacks Worsen Health and Emissions?

This article discusses How Much Trump’s Climate Rule Rollbacks Would Worsen Health and Emissions. Using government data, a new analysis adds up the harm to humans and the climate from scrapping 6 greenhouse gas rules involving cars, power plants and oil and gas.

The report, released Tuesday, homes in on six rules the administration has either tried to suspend or has announced plans to roll back, then calculates the possible damage based on data from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department. The regulations include:

The Clean Power Plan, which would cut emissions from electric utilities;
Clean car standards, which would boost fuel efficiency and reduce emissions from passenger vehicles;
Glider truck pollution rules, which would close a loophole used by freight-hauling trucks with super-polluting rebuilt engines;
Methane standards for new and existing oil and gas sites, which would reduce emissions of the highly potent short-lived climate pollutant;
Methane reductions on federal lands, which would reduce venting and flaring of natural gas on property leased to oil and gas companies by the Interior Department, and
Landfill methane rules, which would cut emissions from municipal waste dumps.

In Rebuke to Pruitt, EPA Science Board Votes to Review Climate Policy Changes

This article discusses the EPA efforts to roll back the Clean Power Plan and weaken auto standards and other regulations. This action was done by the EPA Science Advisory Board, which has more than a dozen a Pruitt-appointed EPA scientists.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board, in a rebuke to the Trump administration’s retreat on environmental protection, voted overwhelmingly Thursday in favor of a full board review of the agency’s most important actions to dismantle climate policy.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who appointed about 15 members of the 44-member board, now must decide whether to accept its recommendation that the outside scientific experts be allowed to formally vet his decisions.

With only two members dissenting, the Science Advisory Board agreed that it had received insufficient information on the science behind several of Pruitt’s decisions—including his planned repeal of the Clean Power Plan and methane regulations on oil and gas operations, the weakening of auto efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions standards, and the elimination of a rule to curb truck pollution. The board also backed a full review of a revised “social cost of carbon” cost-benefit analysis EPA is using that essentially wipes out the benefits of actions to curb carbon emissions.

Google joins Apple in condemning the repeal of the Clean Power Plan

This article discusses the comments submitted by Google condemning the US withdrawal from the Clean Power Plan.

Google filed a public comment today criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to roll back the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era policy that aims to cut power plant pollution. With its comment, Google joins Apple in arguing that keeping the policy is a good deal for the US.

Google’s comment, which it shared with The Verge, lays out what it called “a strong economic case for the Clean Power Plan.” It says that the plan would encourage utilities and companies like Google to keep investing in renewable energy — which Google says is getting cheaper, is desired by both consumers and investors, and is a good source of jobs.

Hundreds of U.S. Mayors Collectively Oppose Trump Reversal of Clean Power Plan

This article talks about how cities and states are collectively fighting Trump’s anti-clean energy agenda.

Mayors from 233 U.S. cities, representing more than 51 million Americans in 46 states and territories, have released a joint letter voicing their opposition of the Trump administration’s efforts to repeal the Clean Power Plan, arguing that the reversal would “put our citizens at risk and harm our efforts to address the urgent threat of climate change.”

Signatories of the letter, sent directly to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, include mayors from states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, and Michigan.

The annual cost of coastal storm damage is expect to reach $35 billion by the 2030s, and coastal property valued at up to $106 billion could be flooded by 2050, according to a report by the Risky Business Project, which analyzes the economic impacts of climate change in the U.S.

Study: Most Americans want the government to combat climate change

The largest shares of Americans say they oppose the repeal of the Clean Power Plan and the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. The number of people who say they favor fracking more than doubles when presented with evidence that it will save them money on utility bills.

Sixty-one percent of Americans think climate change is a problem that the government needs to address, including 43 percent of Republicans and 80 percent of Democrats, according to a new survey from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.