EPA Administrator: Telling the Truth About the Environment and Our Economy

[kristopher]

Lisa P. Jackson
EPA Administrator

Telling the Truth About the Environment and Our Economy
Posted: 8/31/11 04:31 PM ET

It's a certainty in Washington that lobbyist talking points and inside-the-beltway speeches are going to be overblown and exaggerated. But lately, misleading claims about the EPA's work have been making their way into the mainstream debate.

The most notable is an industry report that the EPA is responsible for an unprecedented "train wreck" of clean air standards that will lead to the mass closure of power plants. The "train wreck" claim has been repeated by everyone from congressional leaders to major newspapers. It sounds pretty scary, but the trouble with these reports -- there is no "train wreck."

Earlier this month a Congressional Research Service report concluded that industry's claims were made "before EPA proposed most of the rules whose impacts they analyze," and are based on "more stringent requirements than EPA proposed in many cases."

On the issue of plant closures, I take the word of industry leaders like the Chairman and CEO of Exelon Corporation, who said "These regulations will not kill coal... up to 50% of retirements are due to the current economics of the plant due to natural gas and coal prices." The Congressional Research Service report also found that EPA's standards will primarily affect "coal-fired plants more than 40 years old that have not, until now, installed state-of-the-art pollution controls." That echoed the remarks of the CEO of American Electric Power from April of this year: "We've been quite clear that we fully intend to retire the 5,480 megawatts of our overall coal fleet because they are less efficient and have not been retrofitted in any particular way."

This is just one example from the larger debate ...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-p-jackson/republicans-epa_b_943972.html

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[txlibdem]

2. Coal plant tall smokestacks: somebody else's problem

GAO found that many older coal plants have tall smokestacks and no modern pollution controls. Fifty-six percent of the boilers attached to tall stacks lack scrubbers to control sulfur dioxide (SO2), and 63 percent do not have controls to trap emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx).

"Stack height is one of several factors that contribute to the interstate transport of air pollution," the report says. "While the use of pollution controls has increased in recent years at coal power plants, several boilers connected to tall stacks remain uncontrolled."

U.S. EPA has discouraged tall stacks by writing a "good engineering practice" formula that bars power companies from taking credit for the air quality benefits that result from stacks taller than a certain height. Of the 48 stacks above 500 feet that were built since those rules were upheld in court in 1988, 17 are taller than the formula height.

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/06/13/13greenwire-gao-faults-tall-smokestacks-at-coal-plants-55552.html

[GliderGuider]

3. If we could only build REALLY tall smokestacks

Say 22,000 miles tall, so we could simply exhaust all that CO2 (that's not being scrubbed) right out of the atmosphere directly into geosynchronous orbit.
Maybe this would an engineering project worthy of the save-our-bacon-with-a-sliderule contingent.

===>:sarcasm:<===

[BeFree]

4. You don't get it, do you?

Slide-rulers are gonna save us. Just trust in them and keep the faith.

Sure, they got us where we are today, but they'll change.

============>0<==========

What we should have done was build huge domes and run the exhaust gasses through the dome filtering out the particulates. Instead we spread them far and wide. Cheaper that way, according to the slide-rulers.

[GliderGuider]

5. Thank you!

You've restored my faith. I accept Ray Kurzweil as my lord and saviour, for me and all humanity. I promise never to stray from the nanopath again.

Hallelujah!

[txlibdem]

6. I hope you two are just having fun; these monstrous coal stacks just push the can down the road

As I said: somebody else's problem to deal with. If you build your coal plant near the state line and build a tall enough smokestack then your state will not get fined for (or have to deal with) poor air quality (at least that is what it sounds like they are saying). If anyone out there could come up with a more idiotic policy than fining the state where the pollution LANDS versus where it is created... please keep it to yourself.

Following that logic, New York City should build giant sling shots to hurl their toxic waste over the border to Canada: tag you're it!

The intelligent use of science would have had these coal plants closed down days after Jimmy Carter was sworn in for his 2nd term as President (instead we got the D-list actor who is most famous for making a movie with a chimp -- and decades farther behind in dealing with the environmental, economic, and geopolitical crisis of fossil fuels).