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John Rowe, CEO of Exelon: “The EPA is simply enforcing the requirements of the existing Clean Air Act as the Act has been interpreted by the courts, including the Supreme Court.”

By Jorge Madrid and Celine Ramstein

For the first time in history, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed to limit the carbon dioxide pollution from new power plants.  This will slow the growth of the major pollutant responsible for global climate change, which threatens the health and safety of Americans.  This new standard will have far-reaching public health impacts and finally put a limit on emissions from the single largest carbon pollution source in America: burning coal for electricity.

The Carbon Pollution Standard directs new power plants that begin construction after the rule is finalized should “meet an output‐based standard of 1,000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt‐hour.”  The typical new coal fired power plant would have to reduce their carbon pollution by 40 to 60 percent.  Natural gas power plants should be able to comply with this standard without additional controls.

The proposal was published in the Federal Register today. Now an official comment period begins for the next 60 days in which the public is invited to submit comments to the EPA on this proposed rule.   EPA will probably conduct several public meetings in various major cities, too.

This historic proposal comes at a critical juncture, as Nobel Laureate and Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently reminded us the scientific evidence of climate change is getting more and more powerful, and that the pace of some effects have been underestimated: “[sea level] is rising even faster than we thought…the numbers of violent rainstorms have increased faster than we thought.”

The new rule also offers a real chance to protect children and public health, which is why over 120 health organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Lung Association, American Medical Association, American Nurses Association, American Public Health Association, American Thoracic Society and others are on record stating:

Climate change is a serious public health issue. As temperatures rise, more Americans will be exposed to conditions that can result in illness and death due to respiratory illness, heat- and weather-related stress and disease carried by insects. These health issues are likely to have the greatest impact on our most vulnerable communities, including children, older adults, those with serious health conditions and the most economically disadvantaged.

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One century ago this weekend, the great “unsinkable” ship ignored warnings of ice bergs in the vicinity, maintained a high speed, hit an iceberg because it couldn’t change course fast enough, and sank. Most passengers died, in large part because there weren’t enough lifeboats.

The New Yorker and the Washington Post have devoted major columns to “Why we can’t let go of the Titanic” and why ”fascination with it seems to be” unsinkable .

Director James Cameron offered his own answer this week, in Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron on National Geographic Channel, which I’ve transcribed here. Cameron, who has also released a 3-D version of his epic block-buster movie on the doomed ship, made the connection between what happened on the Titanic and our climate predicament:

Part of the Titanic parable is of arrogance, of hubris, of the sense that we’re too big to fail. Well, where have we heard that one before?

There was this big machine, this human system, that was pushing forward with so much momentum that it couldn’t turn, it couldn’t stop in time to avert a disaster. And that’s what we have right now.

Within that human system on board that ship, if you want to make it a microcosm of the world, you have different classes, you’ve got first class, second class, third class. In our world right now you’ve got developed nations, undeveloped nations.

You’ve got the starving millions who are going to be the ones most affected by the next iceberg that we hit, which is going to be climate change. We can see that iceberg ahead of us right now, but we can’t turn.

We can’t turn because of the momentum of the system, the political momentum, the business momentum. There too many people making money out of the system, the way the system works right now and those people frankly have their hands on the levers of power and aren’t ready to let ‘em go.

Until they do we will not be able to turn to miss that iceberg and we’re going to hit it, and when we hit it, the rich are still going to be able to get their access to food, to arable land, to water and so on. It’s going to be poor, it’s going to be the steerage that are going to be impacted. It’s the same with Titanic.

I think that’s why this story will always fascinate people. Because it’s a perfect little encapsulation of the world, and all social spectra, but until our lives are really put at risk, the moment of truth, we don’t know what we would do. And that’s my final word.

If we don’t act soon, the latest science suggests that few will escape the dire consequences, but certainly the poorest will suffer the most and the very rich will be able to insulate themselves, at least for a while (see “The Other 99% of Us Can’t Buy Our Way Out of the Impending Global Ponzi Scheme Collapse“).

For the record, as the WashPost points out, “First-class men, though collectively glorified for letting steerage women and children go first in the lifeboats, actually survived at a higher rate than the third-class children.”

Stephen Cox, a literature professor at UC San Diego, and author of The Titanic Story: Hard Choices, Dangerous Decisions, tells the WashPost, “I don’t think a myth can develop unless you have a choice that could be very unfortunate or tragic.” In the case of the Titanic, lots of tragic choices were made, including the decision to steam ahead at high speed in the face of iceberg warnings serious enough to cause other ships, like the Californian, to stop completely that night.

The tragedy today is not merely that we are ignoring multiple, highly credible warnings of disaster if we stay on our current course. The tragedy is that the cost of action is so low, one tenth of a penny on the dollar, not counting co-benefits (see “Introduction to climate economics“) — while the cost of inaction is nearly incalculable, hundreds of trillions of dollars.

The International Energy Agency warned last November that on our current path, “rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change” — warming of an almost unthinkable 6°C [11°F] — whereas “Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”

Cameron is hardly the first person to compare our current predicament with the Titanic. In fact, three years ago Newsweek’s Evan Thomas used the metaphor, unintentionally offering one explanation for why the “status quo” establishment media’s coverage of global warming is so fatefully inadquate.

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by Tom Laskawy, via Grist

When I examined the reasons agriculture often gets a pass in climate negotiations recently, I pointed to the fact that precise measurement of the climate impact of many industrial farming practices remains difficult and controversial. This is especially true when it comes to synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.

The effect of excess fertilizer on our waterways gets much more attention than it does when it enters the air. And for good reason. It’s toxic to consume nitrates in your drinking water. We’re learning that agricultural overuse of fertilizer has contaminated the drinking water of whole regions of California. Meanwhile, nitrogen that runs into the ocean causes oxygen-depleted “dead zones” around the world. The dead zone in our own Gulf Of Mexico (measured every summer) keeps getting larger — last year’s was the size of New Jersey.

While we know that excess fertilizer escapes farm fields as gas, exactly how much and where it goes has largely been a mystery. But it has been a mystery worth solving, as the amount of nitrous oxide — the third most potent greenhouse gas behind carbon dioxide and methane — in the atmosphere is increasing fast. In fact, it has risen by 20 percent since the Industrial Revolution, with a good part of that increase coming in the last 50 years. For the sake of comparison, atmospheric carbon dioxide rates have increased around 40 percent in the same period. But nitrous oxide is around 300 times more potent as a greenhouse gas. And it’s also a major ozone-depleting chemical.

Pinpointing the cause of these nitrous emissions has been made especially difficult by the fact that every molecule of nitrous oxide looks alike. And there are so many sources — from microbes in farm fields, oceans, and natural landscapes to oceanic phenomena and human activities like rainforest destruction.

As a result, it has been impossible to know just how much is coming from fertilizer use; and Big Ag has never been made accountable. But that may have all just changed.

Now, a group of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have found a way to “fingerprint” various sources of nitrous oxide — and they’ve determined that the accelerated increase in atmospheric nitrous oxide in the last few decades has indeed been due to synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use.

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by Jessica Goad and Stephen Lacey

Environmentalists and public health advocates often talk about the harmful “external” costs of coal that are not accounted for in its price.

Those externalities include damage to the local environment, threats to public health, and, of course, climate change.

In a study last year, Dr. Paul Epstein of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School attempted to quantify how harmful coal is:

Our comprehensive review finds that the best estimate for the total economically quantifiable costs, based on a conservative weighting of many of the study findings, amount to some $345.3 billion, adding close to 17.8¢/kWh of electricity generated from coal…. These and the more difficult to quantify externalities are borne by the general public.

While these costs are very real, the economic argument can still be abstract to people. So it’s helpful to look at more tangible ways the coal industry is being subsidized by the American taxpayer. Indeed, coal companies benefit from tax breaks, public land loopholes, and subsidized railroads that help them continue being “cheap.”

Below are a few examples of the kind of government support we give the coal industry.

1.  Tax breaks

Just as the oil and gas industry receives tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies, coal companies also receive preferential treatment from the Internal Revenue Service.  The Treasury Department estimates that eliminating just three tax preferences for coal would save $2.6 billion between 2013-2022:

-  Expensing of exploration and development costs:  Under current law, coal companies can expense costs incurred by locating coal ore deposits.

-  Percentage Depletion for Hard Mineral Fossil Fuels:  As the tax code currently stands, coal companies can claim a tax deduction to cover the costs of investments in mines.

-  Capital Gains Treatment for Royalties: Some coal royalties for private owners are treated as long-term capital gains, so they are taxed at a lower rate.

2.  Public land loopholes

According the Energy Information Administration, 43.2 percent of U.S. coal comes from public lands.  However, the coal industry benefits from a number of loopholes that make obtaining leases on public lands easier and cheaper.

For example, the nation’s largest coal producing region, the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, is not legally classified as a “coal-producing region.”  This means that coal tracts within it are rarely competitively leased, which shortchanges taxpayers for the value of the land and the coal underneath it.

Additionally, some have alleged that the non-public process by which the Bureau of Land Management determines fair market value for coal on public lands is flawed.  In a lengthy legal brief, Tom Sanzillo of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis outlines how the value established by the government is much lower than would the market would command: “In the broader economic arena where coal is bought and sold, the FMV lease process does not capture the full value of the coal.”

3.  Subsidized railroads

Coal is the most important commodity transported on railroads in America.  As the Association of American Railroads describes, “In 2009, coal accounted for 47 percent of tonnage and 25 percent of revenue for U.S. railroads.”  U.S. railroads get loans and loan guarantees from government agencies like the Department of Transportation/Federal Railroad Administration and have received numerous tax incentives for investments in new infrastructure.

The relationship between coal and railroads becomes more important when considering coal exports. On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that American coal exports have “surged” to the highest levels since 1991. A large portion of these exports are going to Asian countries, where coal use has exploded. This begs the question: are American taxpayers subsidizing the coal boom in countries like China, thus helping accelerate global warming at an even faster rate?

In the end, the taxpayer is paying more for coal than the industry would like you to believe.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for American Progress’ Public Lands Project. Stephen Lacey is a blogger with Climate Progress.

Related Post:

• Economics Stunner: “Coal-Fired Power Plants Have Air Pollution Damages Larger Than Their Value Added.”

An economist argues we must cap emissions or put a price on carbon in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change

by Gernot Wagner, reposted from Yale Environment 360

Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy and a Nobel laureate, has argued that what the world needs is a handful of Nobel-level breakthroughs in energy technology. They sure would come in handy in the fight to avoid the worst consequences of global warming. But counting on breakthroughs is a crapshoot. We cannot rely on a miracle to navigate away from our current head-on collision with the planet.

That hasn’t stopped Breakthrough Institute co-founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger from arguing — as they did in a recent article for Yale Environment 360 — that technology research will stop the runaway train of climate change. You don’t have to bother limiting emissions through a carbon price or cap, they say, because energy innovation will come to the rescue.

Frankly, this is bunk. Reasonable people may disagree about what policies will best fight climate change. But climate science makes one thing clear: The planet must limit carbon emissions, or face a bleak future. And we will never get there unless we make policy changes that align market incentives with this goal. It’s economics 101. There’s no way to avoid making polluters pay for the damage they cause, or they’ll keep causing it. That either starts with a price on carbon or, ideally, a cap on carbon emissions.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger argue that taxing or capping carbon pollution is tough, so better to invest in new pollution control technologies instead (though they don’t say where those investments would come from —the deficit-obsessed U.S. Congress doesn’t seem poised to provide major new funding for clean-energy R & D). Certainly, it’s true that it will be tough to keep polluters from passing on the costs of their pollution to the rest of us, as they always have. It’s also true that innovation in governance has never been easy. Ask Niccolò Machiavelli, who wrote in The Prince, back in 1505: “The innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.”

And, yes, greater investment in clean energy R&D will likely produce important advances, especially if government takes a more active role, as urged by the American Energy Innovation Council, whose leaders include hardheaded business types like John Doerr, Bill Gates, Chad Holliday, and Jeff Immelt.

But no one, including the American Energy Innovation Council, would seriously suggest — as Nordhaus and Shellenberger do — that we just focus on innovation and dismiss the hard but all-important task of capping or pricing pollution.

R & D alone just isn’t enough. There’s an all-important second “D”: deployment. And clean energy deployment won’t happen by itself. The world already has a $5 trillion-a-year energy industry that makes lots of money for lots of people, and does so while forcing the rest of us to pay enormous socialized costs of its pollution.

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Our round-up of the latest in climate and clean energy. Please post additional links below

The U.S. government is creating a “boom and bust” in renewable energy investment that threatens to undermine its lead over China, the Pew Charitable Trusts said in a report. Phyllis Cuttino, Pew’s clean energy director, said “In the absence of long-term policy, it’s hard to see how the U.S. can grow significantly in the future.” [Bloomberg]

In 2011, it was Texas that went up in flames, with a historic drought and searing heat wave leading to the worst wildfire season on record. A year later, another southern state affected by intense drought is bracing for a destructive wildfire season: Florida. [Climate Central]

Scientists studying the environmental impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are raising fresh concerns about the effect of the leaked crude on a range of sea life, from tiny animal plankton to dolphins. [Wall Street Journal]

Fire experts say this year’s drought, low snowpack and record-high temperatures in much of the West portend a dangerous installment of what has become a year-round wildfire threat. [Washington Post]

The Environmental Protection Agency wants cleaner air at national parks across the country, including Guadalupe Mountains and Big Bend in Texas. By November, it is supposed to complete a plan that could regulate emissions from dozens of Texas’ industrial plants, with the goal of reducing haze at parks. [New York Times]

Climate change is likely to wreak havoc on California’s forests. Extreme weather, wildfires and insect outbreaks will all take a toll. Add to those another looming threat: disease. Forest diseases like Sudden Oak Death, which has infected trees in 14 counties in the state, stand to benefit from the effects of climate change, to the detriment, obviously, of the trees. [National Public Radio]

Rapid climate change and its potential to intensify droughts and floods could threaten Asia’s rice production and pose a significant threat to millions of people across the region, leading climate specialists and agricultural scientists have warned. [Zeenews]

Sea levels in the southwest Pacific started rising drastically in the 1880s, with a notable peak in the 1990s thought to be linked to human-induced climate change, according to a new study. [AFP]