Front Burner:
What comes after Clean Power Plan?
In a dangerously shortsighted move, the Trump administration is repealing the first-ever national policy to limit carbon pollution, known as the Clean Power Plan. Reversing course on cleaning up power plants is a colossal failure of responsibility.
Ironically, the president’s Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt criticized the plan, claiming it picked “winners and losers.” In reality, it is the Trump administration that’s picking winners and losers.
The winners are the coal companies that pollute for free. The losers are the rest of us who pay a steep price.
On its face, propping up coal makes no sense. Coal use has declined for seven decades because solar, wind and energy efficiency are cheaper. Plus, extracting coal requires dangerous underground mining or mountaintop removal. Burning coal generates toxic ash, sludge and chemical waste. Air emissions like soot, smog and acid rain are dangerous while increased carbon hastens climate change.
Ignoring science as greenhouse-gas emissions rise has costly consequences in the form of devastating wildfires, massive hurricanes, a melting Arctic and rising seas.
More than 50 years ago, President Lyndon Johnson first warned that carbon pollution had “altered the composition of the atmosphere through a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.” Five decades later, power plants still spew carbon with impunity owing to compliant politicians who enjoy political contributions from coal companies and their allies.
Make no mistake; encouraging power-plant pollution is an attack on public health and our natural environment. But it is also a missed opportunity to create good-paying local jobs and grow the economy.
The Clean Power Plan offered a pathway to reduce carbon pollution from power plants a modest 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Reductions would come from energy efficiency, renewable energy, nuclear power and converting coal-fired power plants to burn gas, instead. States had maximum flexibility to tailor reduction plans to best meet their needs.
The plan’s benefits were many. Coal pollution takes a toll on health. The Clean Power Plan would have prevented 3,600 premature deaths, 1,700 heart attacks, 90,000 asthma attacks and 300,000 missed work and school days, according to President Obama’s EPA. It estimated that, for every $1 spent on the Clean Power Plan, $4 would be saved by preventing health problems. Harvard’s School of Public Health estimated billions of dollars in annual savings for health costs.
In addition to health savings, the Clean Power Plan would have resulted in economic development and job creation. Nationally, thousands of clean-energy jobs would have added more than $50 billion to the gross domestic product in 2030. The Department of Energy just found that in the U.S, more than twice as many people work in solar (374,000) than in coal (160,000). Environmental Entrepreneurs, a national, nonpartisan group of business leaders and investors, said Florida would see as many as 44,800 new clean-energy jobs under the Clean Power Plan.
Meanwhile our international competition gets it. China is the world’s largest producer of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. Last year, China invested almost twice as much on clean energy as the U.S. In China, 3.6 million people work in renewable energy, compared with 777,000 here.
Since energy efficiency, solar and wind are now the lowestcost ways to meet our energy needs, the Clean Power Plan would have saved you money. For example, Gulf Power in Florida’s Panhandle could reduce costs for customers by $5 million per year by replacing two particularly inefficient coal units with wind or solar.
The future is undeniable, yet instead of making America great again by growing the economy, creating local jobs and capturing life-saving health benefits, President Trump and his EPA administrator are working to tip the scale for coal interests while you and your grandchildren foot the bill. Undercutting efforts to reduce pollution by rolling back the Clean Power Plan is utter recklessness and sadly, the consequences are deadly.
The winners are the coal companies that pollute for free.