By David Wagman, Chief Editor, Power Engineering magazine
Sen. Lisa Murkowski is taking on the Environmental Protection Agency and its efforts to develop greenhouse gas regulations that will affect virtually every electric power generator in the U.S.
The Alaska Republican said she would try to keep the EPA from drawing up rules on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, refineries, manufacturers and other large emitters by filing a “disapproval resolution.” This is a procedural tool in Congress that prohibits rules written by executive branch agencies from taking effect.
Murkowski argues it’s Congress and not the EPA that should write the rules to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.
“If Congress allows this to happen there will be severe consequences to our economy,” Murkowski was quoted by one news agency as saying. “Businesses will be forced to cut jobs, if not move outside our borders or close their doors for good perhaps. Domestic energy production will be severely restricted, increasing our dependence on foreign suppliers and threatening our national security.”
EPA administrator Lisa Jackson on January 21 reportedly urged senators to reject Murkowski’s proposal, saying in a statement that it “put politics over science” and would require the EPA to ignore not only the Supreme Court’s directive but “the evidence before our own eyes.”
“The Murkowski resolution asks each senator to deny the overwhelming science that greenhouse gas pollution is a real and serious threat to the health and welfare of our citizens,’ she is quoted as saying. “And it would be a reversal of the formal recognition that both the Senate and the House have already made of the harmful effects of greenhouse gas pollution.”
At its core, Jackson said, Murkowski’s resolution “is not about preventing or postponing regulation, but about denying the established scientific fact that greenhouse gases threaten the health of our people.”
The EPA is working on regulations that will limit emissions by large producers of greenhouse gases as part of a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring the agency to determine whether greenhouse gases endanger the country’s health and welfare.
Both the White House and congressional leaders have said they prefer that Congress write a law that would regulate greenhouse gas emissions. But the legislation has stalled in the Senate. If Congress fails to act, the EPA could set the rules .
What are your thoughts on the controversy?
January 27th, 2010 at 6:47 PM
Man made global warming is putting politics over science. So-called scientists around the world have been manipulating the evidence & suppressing the opinions of those who don\’t agree. Even the EPA has also been suppressing the opinions of those in the agency who don\’t conform to the latest UN political position. Every day the \"science\" is unraveling.
We\’ve been controlling greenhouse gasses for 50 years under EPA direction. The air is cleaner, the water clearer and vehicles more efficient. Carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas, it\’s plant food. The EPA bases their plans on the IPCC report written mostly by politicians and non-science professors who have disregarded good science in favor of inaccuracy and speculation.
It\’s about time we begin using the energy we have while developing alternatives that will take decades to integrate into the system. The fuel for solar and wind energy is free so the energy from those sources must cost less that energy from fossil fuel. Some other alternatives produce more pollution than they cure. The \"smoke\" coming from a power plant stack is white because it is mostly water vapor. I\’m surprised that so many people fall for the fiction of \"man made climate change\". We can\’t even accurately predict the weather for tomorrow.
January 28th, 2010 at 7:35 AM
Too right, Mr Cole. Apples contain cyanide - would these tree-hugging liberals ban apples too? No, because in small doses cyanide is helpful, necessary. Just like CO2. It ain’t a greenhouse gas. No sir.
The EPA should get real jobs.
February 2nd, 2010 at 12:42 PM
David Wagman is to be complimented on his fair airing of both sides of opinions in the matter of regulating CO² in particular and greenhouse gases in general. This laudable kind of balanced reporting is becoming a rare commodity in “journalism”.
My company works on a number of fronts in the biofuels area, and we are delighted to hear recently of a call from AEP for proposals for the delivery of biomass as early as this year as a co-firing fuel for several of their power plants. And while I don’t want this comment to become a litany of praise for Mike Morris, he also has a very realistic grip on the political realities of this period, and a sensible view of cap and trade, which he points out in an interview with Business Week, was essentially how SOx, NOx, and mercury were handled in the past. (see http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/next/archives/2009/01/five_answers_fr_4.html ).
However, I also agree with the folks who say that the idea that “man made” global climate change is “settled science” are grossly exaggerating, especially because they pin so much of the “blame” on human contributions to carbon dioxide which is such a tiny fraction of the mix in the atmosphere. No one has explained how, if we are in a phase of inexorable rising temperatures, why 2008 was colder than 2007. There certainly was no significant dip in the carbon dioxide content of the world’s atmosphere generally. If we are in a state of global warming, isn’t it at least as likely that the record of sunspot activity shows massive bursts of radiation at a statistically significant increase of rate in the last 12 years a more likely primary cause? The amount of energy from the sun that arrives in the earth’s atmosphere every week is more than all the man-made energy in the entire millions of years of human evolution. I think that “scientists” have an inflated opinion about the importance of our species on the planet.
It is likely that a change-over to renewable resources will have an economic impact on some people, and on the electric power industry in particular, but the “creation of wealth” in a capitalist system has traditionally depended on a mild trend of inflation so that those who control the capital assets can periodically have “capital gains” (not all of which are taxed away) which creates new “wealth” and opportunities to re-deploy the capital. We may need to strengthen our social security safety net to avoid unconscionable harm to the disadvantaged, but I think that this transition will be a very good thing.
I expect that “green energy” from renewable resources will be a very good thing for the planet, and for capital and industry. This “renewal” of our industrial base will be much like the shift from rail travel to airplane travel. a mighty leap forward, with tremendous benefits, though not without some bumps in the road along the way. Fortunately the airline industry itself is pioneering in the exploration of renewable fuels and the result will be a significant boost to the foundations of the renewable fuels industry.
Can the coal industry manage to drag the feet of legislators? Probably. Should they? Perhaps, but I think their time would be better spent in developing alternative technologies that make coal a feedstock material to the chemical manufacturing industry instead of a mere combustible fuel. Coal mining interests would be better served by making new alliances than simply opposing the political forces of change. Coal mining towns could experience fabulous growth if they became manufacturing centers of those products being made from coal, and coal as a feedstock resource becomes even cheaper when it is turned into manufactured products without the cost fo transportation of taking it (the raw material) to some other location. As Steven Covey says, “Think win:win.”
We need too to think about economic development for those parts of the world that languish in abject poverty. The Gates contribution to worldwide disease control is a mere drop in the bucket of the work that needs to be done, though it is a great place to start. We need to develop these “third world” regions into a thriving middle class, and renewable energy, from locally cultivated resources and with a fair share (significant equity interest) in the revenues going to benefit local populations, the transition can be far more rapid that most people today can even imagine. (Do a search for a video “green fuel = economic development” to see what I mean.) Daming rivers is expensive and disruptive, even though it is “renewable” energy, but establishing local distributed sources of “green energy” in both electric power and transportation fuels can made a tremendous difference. Combined with smart grid techniques those “earth at night” satellite shots could show a world with more than diamond necklaces of light, but a glimmer of prosperity everywhere thanks to distributed source power development.
Sincerely,
Stafford “Doc” Williamson
February 2nd, 2010 at 12:48 PM
Dear Editors of this blog.
I was so eager to share my thoughts in my comment with you that I forgot to copy it before I submitted.
Whether you decide to publish the comment or not would you please be kind enough to send me a copy?
president@daochienergy.com
Thanks
\\"Doc\\" Williamson
May 8th, 2011 at 2:42 AM
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