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On Monday the Senate held a symposium under the auspices of Sen. Tom Carper’s (D-DE) office — “Climate Change Actions under the Clean Air Act: Reducing Power Plant Emissions without Harming the Economy” — bringing together representatives from both clean energy groups and the energy industry to explore how greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants could be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
The Supreme Court has ruled that under that law, the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate carbon dioxide emissions if it finds them to be a danger to public health and the environment — which it has. The EPA is already finalizing rules for new power plants, with rules for existing plants anticipated to be in the works, which brings us to the symposium’s question of just how to apply those powers.
The stand out presentation came from David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which lays out a plan for the EPA to cut carbon emissions from power plants 26 percent from 2005′s levels by 2020. The plan was run through the same model used by the EPA and a host of other outfits, and according to the analysis it would prevent 3,600 deaths and thousands of other health incidents by 2020, deliver $25 to $60 billion in savings (depending on your preferred discount rate) by avoiding those health effects and the damage of climate change, and it would do this for a compliance cost of only $4 billion in 2020.
The three main parts are:
If states can demonstrate that an alternative approach from the EPA’s model — say, California’s new cap-and-trade system — will deliver equal or better results, they’ll be free to pursue that.
A target of a 17 percent reduction in total carbon dioxide emissions from the 2005 baseline by 2020 was originally laid out in H.R. 2454, the 2009 cap-and-trade bill, and then re-articulated by President Obama. When combined with reductions in carbon emissions due to new car standards, the model of NRDC’s approach (the green line below) suggests it would get the United States quite close to achieving that goal (the dotted white line below.)
The modeling also projected that gas and electricity prices would remain virtually unchanged by this approach.
According to Brad Plumer of the Washington Post, the NRDC’s lawyers say this approach is all perfectly legal under the Clean Air Act. But as it would also break new ground, litigation in the courts is a virtual certainty. And fear of that litigation may be behind recent reports that the Obama Administration is considering delaying the rollout of its standards for existing power plants.
For his part, Doniger said at the symposium that the possibility of delay hardly came as a surprise to him or others in the climate policy world, and that he’s heard no hard evidence that the delay will actually happen. He added that everyone trusts the EPA to work as hard as it can, and that the sources quoted in the Washington Post story may be expressing a wish more than actual knowledge.
But if the delay does happen, “they should expect groups like ours will take legal action to meet their responsibility,” Doniger said.
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