The Fix Is In—No More Coal Plants

The Environmental Protection Agency has issued its first major manifesto since receiving the power to regulate CO2 emissions. And surprise, surprise, it’s aimed at the coal power industry. The crippling new rules would essentially make it impossible for new coal-fueled energy plants to be built.

The coal companies could comply with the rules, but the costs would be astronomical in order to contain CO2 at the levels the EPA wants. Simply put, it’s technically viable, but economically impossible.

Amid huge photos of black smoke-belching chimneys (mostly from pre-1950), the EPA announced the new standards. New power plants would be required to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour of electricity. Today’s more modern plants produce about 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour. But using the junk science of anthropomorphic global warming which declares that carbon dioxide causes that warming, the EPA has set an arbitrary figure that nobody can either prove or disprove. It’s the right number because the bureaucrats say it is.

Natural gas plants already produce the lower level of emissions, but their day has not yet arrived. So far, the Obama administration has been able to keep them in check by denying permits for more drilling, particularly when “fracking” is involved. But currently, coal is the big banana for most of the American Midwest, and therefore the big target for the EPA.

Failing to get Congress to pass Cap and Trade legislation (aka the Al Gore Enrichment Program), the Obama administration is instead using another bureaucratic ploy to end-run the Constitution while advancing its own “green” agenda. If they can’t outright ban coal use, or force a chimerical system of offsets on the American public and the coal producers, they’ll just regulate coal to death under the guise of saving the industry via “carbon capture technology.”

Carbon capture is a simple concept, a complicated technology, and massively expensive. But, gee, it would help get some of that CO2 out of the air, so the EPA is only doing it for the public good. The result for the coal energy plants is one of two alternatives: Install the capture technology at their own expense and absorb the ongoing costs. That alternative leads quickly to bankruptcy. The other alternative (the one the administration is hoping for) is to pass the costs on to the consumers, making energy prices so high that the consumers will vilify the coal energy producers (without noticing who caused it in the first place).

What coal capture does is to store much of the carbon dioxide emissions in the ground instead of releasing it into the air. It’s a win-win for the green weenies. If the producers go forward with the technology, prices will rise dramatically and coal loses. If they instead release the CO2 into the air, they will be fined and ultimately forced into some arcane version of cap and trade. Coal loses. It won’t hurt the rich (it never does), but the poor and middle class will have an even greater daily burden placed on them to go with the skyrocketing cost of gasoline.

The coal industry was already limping along as the result of other heavy-handed EPA regulations regarding SO2 and mercury emissions. With the addition of CO2 to the list of prohibited or regulated emissions, the limp will turn into a complete collapse. And all of this stems from the EPA’s and the Obama administration’s inchoate search for perfectly clean energy to replace reasonably safe and acceptable energy. The former is years or decades away from being practical, the latter is already with us, but about to be destroyed.

To deflect public anger if it closed down all coal-fired energy plants immediately, the EPA has said it is only concerned with new facilities. That goes with the other two great lies: “The check is in the mail, and I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” In fact, at a Congressional committee hearing on the subject, the assistant administrator for EPA’s air and radiation unit said expressly that “the agency has no plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions for existing plants.” That, and $5.00 will get you a gallon of gasoline.

The EPA wrote a cute little escape clause for itself. Knowing full well that any plant that produces energy by using heat is going to have to repair its machinery regularly, it gave itself the power to declare any major repair an “upgrade,” thereby requiring that the older plants comply with the new rules. Naturally, they left it to their own determination what comprises a repair and what comprises an upgrade. Get it? Even the older plants have a very short lease on life.

Despite his idiotic grin, and recent habit of talking just like us common folks, Barack Obama declared his intentions during his first run at the presidency: “If someone wants to build a new coal-fired plant they can, but it will bankrupt them because they will be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.” He didn’t get his cap and trade legislation, but he has since discovered the trick of using his agencies to rule by fiat.

He and his current Energy Secretary have tried to backtrack on their anti-coal, pro-green, pro-high energy price agenda in advance of the November referendum on their policies, but these liars are getting harder to believe by the day, even with their own true believers. At least the “jobs president “ won’t be costing thousands of jobs in the coal industry before the elections. It’s our job to make sure he doesn’t get a chance to do so after the elections.