But hey, if we just elect more Republicans, all this goes away — Republicans being notorious for their efforts to beat back the administrative state!
CEI:
If the carbon dioxide emissions standard for power plants proposed by the EPA today is enacted, the United States will have built its final coal-fired power plant, say experts at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
The proposed standard for new electric plants would, for the first time, place uniform national limits on the amount of carbon dioxide future coal and natural gas power plants are allowed to emit. It would mandate use of carbon capture and sequestration technology for coal plants that is not commercially available and will be extremely expensive even if it does become available in future decades.
The EPA’s analysis of the economic impacts concludes the new rule will have no costs and no benefits. Myron Ebell, director of CEI’s Center for Energy and the Environment, disagrees. “EPA is correct in its analysis that its proposed rule will have no benefits but incorrect in claiming it will have no costs,” Ebell said. “During the several years it will take to finalize the rule and then overturn it in federal court, no electric utility will invest in planning or building a new coal-fired power plant. American consumers and manufacturers will be denied the benefits of the low-cost electricity produced by coal.”
— We call that prices that will “necessarily skyrocket.”
The United States has the largest reserves of coal in the world, and nearly 50 percent of its electricity comes from coal-fired plants. As a result, American families and manufacturers now enjoy the lowest-cost electricity of any major economy. If this rule takes effect, that coal will be sold to overseas customers, who then will have access to lower-cost fuel, erasing a key American competitive advantage, Ebell said.
Marlo Lewis, Senior Fellow in the Center for Energy and Environment, said this rule changes the game in a substantial way.
“It’s far cheaper to build a natural gas power plant that meets a 1,000-pound of CO2/megawatt hour standard than a coal plant that meets the 1,100-lb CO2/MWh standard,” Lewis said. “Like the rule EPA proposed in April 2012, this is an outright fuel-switching mandate. It is still based – though not as brazenly – on the absurd premise that a gas turbine is a ‘system of emission reduction’ ‘adequately demonstrated’ for a coal boiler. Meet the new reg, same as the old reg.”
The EPA’s first attempt to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from new coal and gas-fired power plants was withdrawn in April after it became clear the rule would be overturned in federal court. The rule proposed today makes only cosmetic changes and, according to William Yeatman, Fellow and assistant director of the Center for Energy and Environment at CEI, still has multiple legal defects.
“The rule as proposed is unlikely to survive judicial review,” Yeatman said. “In particular, EPA’s explanation for how carbon capture and sequestration can be achieved industry-wide falls woefully short. The agency relied on ‘crystal ball’ reasoning, which is forbidden by the courts.”
Yeah? Well so was turning a penalty into a Shrodinger’s tax — not to mention, the very bedrock of this nonsense was the “conservative” 3-panel ruling that the EPA could indeed monitor and regulate human exhalation.
So forgive me for not putting much faith in the courts these days.
Obama is seeking to remake the world, and in his blueprint, the US is just one of many countries, its superpower status destroyed, its wealth redistributed, its “exceptionalism” humbled. And as payment for doing the work of supreme social justice, Obama and his family will live high on the hog off what’s left of the taxpayers’ money for the rest of his Marxist life.
Nice gig if you can get it.
Yay. The second Mad Max movie is coming true.
Obama doesn’t have the physique to be Lord Humungous.
Obama is the boyfriend of Humungous’ main bruiser.
If we can’t burn coal maybe we can stock pile it. It could come in real handy if we are hit by a meteor or something and we are all freezing to death.
And that’s the best-case scenario – far more likely is an end to the notion of 24/7 electric service in the United States as coal-fired, natural gas, nuclear and hydropower plants are forced offline due to environmental regulations…
I thought that was Vladimir Putin…
It doesn’t seem like either The Clown Disaster, nor the Reborn Tzar are fit to be models in the world of Mad Max. I’d look instead for models in the capos of the concentration camps scattered across Europe in the late 30s and early 40s.
The proles are so much easier to control when they’re shivering in their 300 square foot “EcoPods.”
Have to say that I’m not a coal fan, either, but my preferred energy source (nuclear) is even less of a non-starter with the Gaia-worshipers.
Of course, it’s safer, less polluting, requires fewer mines, is cleaner in every respect, and (if it weren’t for Luddite lawsuits) cheaper than any other known source.
That’s why they hate it.
Also, we could tell the Arabs to go fuck themselves.
my preferred energy source (nuclear) is even less of a non-starter with the Gaia-worshipers
Nuclear power plants are far too easily damaged. A mere 9.0-magnitude earthquake plus a tsunami borked up that one in Japan something awful.
I’m down with the nukes too. They have some newer designs that leave even less waste than the old ones we’re used to.
Yep. Massive earthquake, tsunami, devastating fire, total loss of all power to the control systems, and it still didn’t cause a nuclear disaster.
I’m not sure how safe these people expect things to be.
Which reminds me – any updates on some of the proposals to start using thorium as a fuel source?
Nuclear is the future. We have perfectly good disused power plants sitting around in the rust belt.
Of course, we have perfectly good oil platforms acting as artificial reefs off the coast of California too. I’m going to invest in tallow and a candle factory.
For the Future!
Coal is so … industrial.
The new make-believe economy needs a new make believe energy to fuel it!
Forget about plastics Braddock.
Unicorn farts and pixie dust, that’s the future.
i like coal you can use a gasifier to turn it into natural gas and then make electricities
coal definitely has a role to play in a robust diversified distributed power system, if only in coal-bearing regions
plus it can also be a feedstock for to produce other useful chemicals
Why not just hook up them critters what produce their own electricity, to the grid? They can finally do something useful for the 17 seconds or so before they go snapcracklepop.
That would be a civil rights violation I’m almost sure
happyfeet says September 20, 2013 at 4:01 pm
i like coal you can use a gasifier to turn it into natural gas and then make electricities
coal definitely has a role to play in a robust diversified distributed power system, if only in coal-bearing regions
plus it can also be a feedstock for to produce other useful chemicals
– See more at: https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51035#comments
That’s by products from the coking process in steel making. Not the least of which is graphite for things like fly rods and bicycle frames. you know. the crap self important liberals buy.
Steel making???
Oh to live in such a country!
Fuel sources don’t have civil rights, Mr. Anderson. Just ask Agent Smith.
the hilarious thing for Comrade Urkel and his Commies is that China is opening a new huge coal plant every two weeks for the next 20 years. this is the equivalent of adding the entire output of France every two years. so our coal will be rolling past shuttered plants on the way to ports loading it for China, where pollution controls are less than robust. this will lead to even more CO2 being released.
Meanwhile, China is also going nuke in a big way. But surely we can have the most productive economy on the planet powered by sun and wind and unicorn farts.
I’ve been reading Paul Johnson’s Modern Times and he has this interesting discussion of how Lenin was obsessed with electrification. There wasn’t a problem on the road to the socialist paradise that couldn’t be solved by more electricity.
Hitler had a somewhat similar obsession with vengeance weapons.
The point being, “green energy” is a high-tech panacea; and high-tech panaceas are a bugbear of a totalitarian mind.
Ernst wrote:
In those three sentences, Ernst has summed-up the whole of the Leftist Future we face.
Ernst, again: The point being, “green energy” is a high-tech panacea; and high-tech panaceas are a bugbear of a totalitarian mind.
Well then, it should be bugbear hunting season again.
you’re too kind
We’ve come a long way since Woody Guthrie (a helluva songwriter, even if he was a commie) wrote odes to the Grand Coulee Dam.
Our nuclear future, maybe. Still, we need to worry about the present until the future shows up.
Speaking of pollutants, President Clown Disaster should hold direct, personal and friendly State to State talks with the new Iranian President Rouhani at the up-coming UN meetings in NY and never mention this subject, or, if he must touch on poison gas somehow, at least not object in any way, especially when only Jews are threatened.
Ha!
Isn’t that a funny twist? Pity the martyrs. Even as though all martyrs are one martyr.