Rule aims to reduce carbon pollution

Industry will fight president’s edict to curb warming

WASHINGTON — The new pollution rule the Obama administration announces on Monday will be a cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s environmental legacy and might be the most-significant environmental regulation in decades.

But it’s not one the White House wanted.

As with other issues, the regulation to limit the pollution blamed for global warming from power plants is a compromise for Obama, who again finds himself caught between his aspirations and what is politically and legally possible.

It will provoke a messy and drawn-out fight with states and with companies that produce electricity, and it might not be settled until the eve of the 2016 presidential election or beyond.

“It’s going to be like eating spaghetti with a spoon. It can be done, but it’s going to be messy and slow,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University in New York.

At the crux of the problem is Obama’s use of a 1970 law that was not intended to regulate the gases blamed for global warming. Obama turned to the Clean Air Act after he failed to get Congress to pass a new law in the first two years of his first term. When the Republicans took over the House, the goal became impossible.

The new rule, as the president described it in a news conference in 2010, is another way of “skinning the cat” on climate change.

“For anybody who cares about this issue, this is it,” said Heather Zichal, Obama’s former energy and climate adviser. “This is all the president has in his toolbox.”

The rule will tap executive powers to tackle the largest source of the pollution blamed for heating the planet: carbon dioxide emitted from power plants. Plants produce about 40 percent of the nation’s electricity and about one-third of the carbon dioxide that makes the U.S. the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

“There are no national limits to the amount of carbon pollution that existing plants can pump into the air we breathe. None,” Obama said yesterday in his weekly radio and Internet

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“We limit the amount of toxic chemicals like mercury, sulfur, and arsenic that power plants put in our air and water. But they can dump unlimited amounts of carbon pollution into the air. It’s not smart, it’s not safe and it doesn’t make sense,” Obama said.

Although major reductions in carbon pollution from cars and trucks resulted from an increase fuel efficiency, manufacturers cooperated with Obama to do that after an $85 billion government bailout.

His rule requiring new power plants to capture some of their carbon dioxide and bury it underground, while significant, has little real-world impact because few new coal plants are expected to be built due to market conditions.

Both of those rules also prescribed technological fixes or equipment to be placed on auto or power plants.

The rule released on Monday, however, will allow states to require power plants to make changes such as switching from coal to natural gas or to enact other programs to reduce demand for electricity and produce more energy from renewable sources.

States also can set up pollution-trading markets, as 10 have done, to offer more flexibility in how plants cut emissions. Plans won’t be due from states until 2016, but the rule becomes final a year earlier.

That hasn’t stopped the arguments over the proposal.

Some Democrats worried about re-elections in November have asked the White House to double the length of the rulemaking comment period until after then.

The Chamber of Commerce said the rule will cost $50 billion to the economy and kill jobs.

Harvard University, in contrast, said the regulation not only will reduce carbon but also will have a beneficial side effect: cleansing the air of other pollutants. Environmental groups are taking credit for helping to shape it and arguing that it will create jobs, not eliminate them.

Rep. Nick Rahall, a Democrat from West Virginia, which gets 96 percent of its power from coal, said on Thursday that although he didn’t have the details, “from everything we know, we can be sure of this: It will be bad for jobs.” Rahall faces a difficult re-election bid in November.

Obama said such pessimistic views are wrong.

“Now, special interests and their allies in Congress will claim that these guidelines will kill jobs and crush the economy,” Obama said in his address. “Let’s face it; that’s what they always say.”

Attorneys for states and industry also are likely to argue that controls far afield of a power plant violate the law’s intent.

The rule probably will push utilities to rely more on natural gas because burning coal emits about twice as much carbon dioxide. The recent drilling boom in the U.S. has helped lower natural-gas prices and, by extension, electricity prices. But it still is generally cheaper to generate power with coal than with natural gas. Also, naturalgas prices are volatile and can lead to fluctuations in power prices.

The rule will push the U.S. closer to the 17 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020 it promised other countries at the start of Obama’s presidency. It will fall far short of the global reductions that scientists say are needed to stabilize the planet’s temperature.