coal
A Bailout By Any Other Name…
Weak environmental laws are another form of bailouts for private industry
Bailouts – the payment of public funds or resources to rescue or support a private enterprise – are politically very unpopular. The primary challenger who defeated Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in Virginia excoriated Cantor for supporting big banks in the wake of the financial crisis. The bailout of banks after the crisis that …
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CONTINUE READINGA Victory for Clean Air
The D.C. Circuit has upheld EPA’s regulation of mercury from coal-fired plants. We can all breath easier as a result.
EPA won an important victory in the D.C. Circuit today. In White Stallion Energy Center v. EPA, the court upheld EPA’s new regulations limiting mercury from coal-fired power plants. The main issue in the case was about a threshold requirement for regulation. Before setting limits on mercury from coal plants, EPA had to consider studies of …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Significance of EPA’s Proposed Power Plant Standards
Although they won’t have immediate impacts, EPA’s proposed rules for new coal plants will indirectly help shape the future of the industry.
There’s an uproar over EPA’s proposed rules for CO2 emissions from new coal plants, even though no one expects anyone to build a new coal plant for at least a decade. I’ve argued (here and here) that the industry won’t have standing to challenge the rules because they won’t have any imminent impact. In fact, …
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CONTINUE READINGWill Anyone Have Standing to Challenge EPA’s Rules for New Coal Plants?
EPA has issued rules that will essentially require new coal plants to use carbon capture and sequestration, a technology that has not been implemented at full scale yet. No doubt that coal industry and utilities will try to challenge the rules in court. But they probably lack standing to do so for a simple reason: …
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CONTINUE READINGLots of Rhetoric, Not Much New in Obama’s Climate Plan
The Obama Administration just released a “Climate Action Plan” to accompany the speech the President will give this morning at Georgetown University. I applaud the President for delivering a speech devoted exclusively to climate change. But for all the hooplah surrounding the President’s speech as “major,” the measures he’s proposed in the new plan to …
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CONTINUE READINGCoal Power and Climate Denial
What causes certain political figures either to deny the potential for climate change, or deny that human activity is a major cause? That question came to mind while reviewing a new report issued by Ceres entitled Benchmarking Air Emissions for the 100 Largest Electric Power Producers in the United States. The report does an impressive …
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CONTINUE READINGKing Coal’s Fading Grip
According to a new study from Duke, coal may be on the way out. as “[l]ow natural gas prices and stricter, federal emission regulations are promoting a shift away from coal power plants and toward natural gas plants as the lowest-cost means of generating electricity in the United States.” The authors estimate that “the economic …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Political Path to Federal Climate Legislation
For climate legislation to pass, U.S. politics will have to become more like California.
CONTINUE READINGThe Current U.S. Energy Pathway is Paved with Coal, Oil and Natural Gas
How well are we doing, in our efforts to strip fossil fuels from our energy mix? If you want to believe the most recent estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the answer is: not so well. As EIA prepares its 2013 report on the impact of various proposed policy changes, it asks itself: …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Truth About EPA’s Regulation of Coal
EPA has been accused of killing the coal industry by insanely over-regulating coal-fired power plants and factories. The facts are different. The Congressional Research Service is a reliable, non-partisan source of information. Here is what CRS says about the impact of the EPA rules: The primary impacts of many of the rules will largely be …
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