Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
EPA plan aims to ease coal plants’ emissions curbs
President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday unveiled its plan to ease carbon dioxide limits on coalfired power plants by shifting most of the regulatory burden to states.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s Affordable Clean Energy proposal would replace the Clean Power Plan’s sweeping changes in the U.S. electricity mix with more modest emissions curbs at individual power plants.
It would set pollution guidelines based on assumptions about what improvements could be eked out through efficiency upgrades at the facilities, then give states the latitude to design their own plans for paring carbon dioxide emissions at the sites. The Clean Power Plan was proposed during President Barack Obama’s administration.
Andrew Wheeler, the EPA’s acting administrator, said the new proposal “would restore the rule of law and empower states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” while providing “modern, reliable, and affordable energy for all Americans.”
“Today’s proposal provides the states and regulated community the certainty they need to continue environmental progress while fulfilling President Trump’s goal of energy dominance,” Wheeler said in a news release.
The EPA estimates its proposal could pare carbon dioxide emissions as much as 1.5 percent from projected levels without the Obama plan in place.
It is Trump’s second major move in less than a month reflecting a retreat in the fight against global warming, after the administration’s plan to freeze fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks.
Tuesday’s move represents the latest bid by Trump to fulfill campaign promises to revive the coal industry and restore mining jobs. Although it is unlikely to alter significantly the U.S. power mix — or give a big boost to domestic coal demand, which has flagged during competition from cheap natural gas and renewables — industry advocates hailed the effort as curbing federal government overreach and leveling the playing field.
“The policy put forward by the previous administration was an illegal attempt to impose a political agenda on the country’s power system,” Hal Quinn, president of the National Mining Association, said in an emailed statement. “The replacement rule respects the infrastructure and economic realities that are unique to each state, allowing for state-driven solutions, as intended by the Clean Air Act, rather than top down mandates.”
Environmental advocates and the architects of Obama’s ambitious plan derided the Trump administration’s proposed replacement as political pandering and said it represented a U.S. retreat from the global fight against climate change. The move dovetails with a separate administration proposal to relax Obama-era greenhouse gas emission limits on vehicles and coming efforts to ease restrictions on the amount of methane that can escape from oil wells.
“The world’s on fire and the Trump administration wants to make it worse,” said Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This dirty power plan is riddled with gimmicks and giveaways. It would mean more climate-changing pollution from power plants.”
Reaction in Arkansas was mixed.
A spokesman for Entergy Arkansas said the company would need some time to review the proposed rule but noted investments the utility has already made in energy efficiency, zero-emission renewable energy installation and natural-gas power plants, which emit less carbon dioxide than coal-fired power plants.
Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality Director Becky Keogh said the proposal would draw “on the strength of state cooperation” while allowing Arkansas to find a way to “advance clean air and energy solutions.”
She said the proposed rule was consistent with the EPA’s authority.
The Sierra Club called the proposal the “Wheeler-Pruitt Dirty Power Plan” and argued that the Clean Power Plan would have reduced asthma attacks and premature deaths by cutting down on the use of coal plants.
Carbon emissions would have been reduced in Arkansas by 36 percent under the Clean Power Plan, noted Glen Hooks, director of the Sierra Club’s Arkansas chapter.
The new proposal is “an effort to prop up the the dying and dirty coal industry,” Hooks said in a statement.
The EPA’s 289-page regulatory analysis acknowledged that every possible scenario under its proposal projects “small increases” in climate-changing emissions and some pollutants, compared with the Obama plan.
EPA officials said they could give no firm projections for the health effects of their plan because that will depend on how states regulate power plants within their borders.
But models provided by the agency estimate that under the Trump plan, 300 to 1,500 more people would die prematurely each year by 2030, compared with the Obama plan.
The models for the Trump plan also project tens of thousands of additional major asthma attacks and hundreds more heart attacks compared
with the Obama plan.
When health costs from air pollution — deaths from soot and smog, increased asthma and heart attacks — are factored in, the repeal of the coal power plan would cost the country $1.4 billion to $3.9 billion annually, according to the agency.
Administration officials are on track to finalize the new regulation next year, after a 60-day public comment period on Tuesday’s proposal, but critics already have vowed to battle the change in federal court and the legal disputes could take years to resolve. As it stands, Obama’s Clean Power Plan never went into effect. During legal challenges from opponents who said it overstepped the EPA’s authority under federal law, the U.S. Supreme Court put the initiative on hold in February 2016.
“If the Trump administration’s proposal to dismantle the Clean Power Plan is adopted, we will work with our state and local partners to file suit to block it, in order to protect New Yorkers, and all Americans, from the increasingly devastating impacts of climate change,” said New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood.
According to the EPA, once the plan is fully implemented, power sector emissions could fall 33 percent to 34 percent below 2005 levels — roughly mirroring the same target as Obama’s initiative, which sought to cut those greenhouse gas emissions 32 percent relative to 2005.
Trump’s EPA says its replacement would be cheaper, too, costing some $400 million less each year than Obama’s carbon dioxide curbs. The agency also forecasts a modest, potentially 0.5 percent reduction in retail electricity prices.
The approach shows the Trump administration abandoning Obama’s expansive view of what constitutes the “best system of emission reductions” for a more narrow, facility-focused interpretation that conservatives say is within the bounds of the Clean Air Act that provides the framework for air-pollution regulations.
Under the Trump plan, the EPA would establish broad guidelines on the technologies that can be used to pare carbon dioxide emissions and then give states three years to develop their own plans for paring that pollution.
It also would overhaul the triggers that prompt new permit reviews — and potentially expensive new pollution controls — that have been criticized as onerous by owners of power plants, refineries and other industrial sites. The changes, aimed at power plants, would better enable the kind of efficiency upgrades envisioned under the Trump proposal, EPA Assistant Administrator Bill Wehrum told reporters on a conference call.
Since 2010, power plant owners have either retired or announced plans to retire 630 coal-fired facilities in 43 states — nearly 40 percent of the U.S. coal fleet, according to data by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a trade group representing utilities such as Southern Co. and producers such as Peabody Energy.