Regulating CO2 Under the Clean Air Act—Not the Kind of Change We Have Been Waiting For

Yesterday, Bloomberg.com reported that Barack Obama believes that carbon dioxide endangers human health and welfare and thinks it should be regulated using the Clean Air Act.

What are the likely outcomes if carbon dioxide is regulated under the Clean Air Act?

Regulating carbon dioxide means regulating the activities that emit carbon dioxide. In the United States, 85% of the energy we use comes from sources that emit carbon dioxide—coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Regulating these sources of energy will increase prices to consumers (e.g. electricity and gasoline)and reduce the economic efficiency of the economy, leading to job losses and large reductions in economic growth.

The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis has estimated the economic impacts of carbon dioxide regulation, finding that regulating carbon dioxide using the Clean Air Act would:

* Reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $6.9 trillion by 2029. * Reduce employment in the manufacturing sector by 2.9 million jobs by 2029. * Reduce employment in: o Mining by 7.4%; o Transportation and warehousing by 17%; o Durable manufacturing by 28%; o Textile mills by 28%; o Paper and paper products by 36%; o Plastics and rubber products by 54%; o Machinery manufacturing by 57%.

As the Center notes, “The study measures only the likely impacts through 2029, at which point CO2 will have been cut by 31% below the 2005 level. The ultimate CO2 reduction target will likely exceed 70% by 2050.”

Over 1.2 million business will need to get carbon dioxide emission permits from EPA.

From: http://maxedoutmama.blogspot.com/

Friday, October 17, 2008

Obama Is A Dangerous Economic Bufffoon

Really! Don't get me wrong, he's a nice guy, a decent guy, a guy who wants to do the best for the country - but he not only has no idea of how to help the country, he doesn't even have the experience to know that he doesn't.

You had better read this post and think hard before you vote for him!

Obama has announced that he will move as president to designate CO2 as a pollutant. This would set the framework for an EPA plan that will halt most coal plants, and even affect FARMS! Anthony Watts has the bleeping story. Read the flippin' comments.

If Obama had more experience in actually governing, he would understand the epic scope and disruption of what he proposes to do.

McCain is barely better, but at least he's not stupid enough to get on this bandwagon (from the comments):

The only surprise here is that Obama’s advisers announced this now. Having EPA regulation GHGs under the Clean Air Act means dramatically higher costs for energy (85% of our energy comes from coal, petroleum, and natural gas). Obama would require over 1.2 million medium to large buildings to get permits because they emit GHGs.
* 1 million mid-sized to large buildings–this includes 10% of all churches, 1/5 of all food service businesses, half of the buildings in the lodging industry, and 92,000 health care facilities.
* 200,000 manufacturing operations
* 20,000 large farms

This plan also means that a lot of farms will need permits from EPA to stay in business. According to the Department of Agriculture:
According to the Department of Agriculture the following will need permits:
* Dairy facilities with over 25 cows
* Beef operations with over 50 cattle
* Swine operations with more than 200 hogs
* Farms with more than 500 acres of corn

This is just a taste of how far reaching this plan is

This is the EPA's Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR). At this page you can read the proposed
rules (as far as they've gotten) and comment on them. The two pdf links (huge pdfs) I have given you are "scope" documents and together these overviews are over 1,000 pages. From page 4 of the first link:

EPA is also faced with the broader ramifications of any regulation of motor vehicle GHG emissions under the CAA in response to the Supreme Court’s decision. Over the past several months, EPA has received seven petitions from states, localities, and environmental groups to set emission standards under Title II of Act for other types of mobile sources, including nonroad vehicles such as construction and farm equipment, ships and aircraft. The Agency has also received public comments seeking the addition of GHGs to the pollutants covered by the new source performance standard (NSPS) for several industrial sectors under section 111 of the CAA. In addition, legal challenges have been brought seeking controls for GHG emissions in preconstruction permits for several coal-fired power plants.

Over the last few months, at least three new coal plants have been halted already by federal courts due to legal challenges over carbon emissions. Obama's action would give every single environmental extremist in the country very powerful legal standing to block most non-nuclear projects, excepting wind and solar. Many of the big solar plants proposed are already being blocked by the EPA because of the extremely high land usage they would require. Nor do we even have the transmission lines in place to cycle the energy around the country, or the storage facilities to balance out the load. If you try wind, the picture is even worse.

Of course, Obama's current position on nuclear power is that it can't be done unless storage is provided, and he's against storage and reprocessing, so no nukes. That leaves wind and solar, and see the end of this post for those options.

If this guy is voted into office, the country is going to get exactly what it deserves - poverty. Of course, the real sufferers will be the lower income people, who will not be able to pay the additional costs. The extremist environmentalists have declared war on the poor. This is what we get for letting a bunch of rich people stroke their egos at the expense of the welfare of the common citizen.

CAA is the Clean Air Act. The story states that Obama will direct the EPA to name carbon dioxide (which you emit with each breath) a HAP (Hazardous Air Pollutant). That would bring carbon dioxide emissions under Section 112 of the CAA, and section 112 would require that the EPA set standards for any emitter of 10 tons per year of CO2 or any emitter of 25 tons of any combination of HAPs. Section 112 leaves little latitude for the EPA. Those sources would include farms, quite a few private heating plants, etc.

I now quote from the DOE letter found on page 39 of this ANPR release:

It is entirely unclear at this point what sort of MACT standard would be placed on which sources for purposes of controlling GHG emissions, what such controls would cost, and whether such controls would be effective. However, complying with MACT standards with respect to GHG emission controls likely would place a significant burden on States and localities, manufacturing and industrial facilities, businesses, power plants, and potentially thousands of other sources throughout the United States. As the draft explains, section 112 “appears to allow EPA little flexibility regarding either the source categories to be regulated or the size of sources to regulate…. EPA would be required to regulate a very large number of new and existing stationary sources, including smaller sources…we believe that small commercial or institutional establishments and facilities with natural gas fired furnaces would exceed this major source threshold; indeed, a large single family residence could exceed this threshold if all appliances consumed natural gas.”

Compliance with the standards under section 112 is required to be immediate for most new sources and within 3-4 years for existing sources. Such a strict timeline would leave little to no time for emission capture and reduction technologies to emerge, develop, and become cost-effective.

In order to escape the permitting process (and the EPA could not process these permits - it would require more than doubling or tripling the staff), businesses and some homes would be forced to turn to electricity.

But you know what? We can't produce enough electricity. We can't. We don't have the bleeping power plants to do it! Read this 36 page outline of the challenges facing the US electricity grid, which include:

U.S. baseload generation capacity reserve margins have declined precipitously to 17 percent in 2007, from 30-40 percent in the early 1990s. A 12-15 percent capacity reserve margin is the minimum required to ensure reliability and stability of the nation’s electricity system.
Investments in new generation and transmission required by 2016 will be a minimum of $300 billion dollars. This may be a conservative estimate, and actual costs could be much higher.
The latest estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) on installed capital costs are as follows: natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) costs about $750 per installed kilowatt (kW); coal costs about $1,600/kW; nuclear costs nearly $2,600/ kW; solar thermal costs nearly $3,900/kW; and photovoltaics cost more than $5,800/ kW.

If you aren't grasping the overall picture, the net effect of all Obama's policies are to effectively block virtually all new energy development and transmission. The stuff permitted under regulation would be the stuff we can't afford to do.

// posted by MaxedOutMama @ 10/17/2008 07:19:00 AM 0 Old Moderated Comments links to this post

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