At a Thursday conference of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, utility companies and state regulators urged officials to intervene and slow down the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP).
President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory proposal is designed to achieve 30 percent cuts in carbon emissions from power plants below 2005 levels by 2030. As currently written, it demands most of the cuts be front-loaded, with a 2020 deadline that utility companies and state regulators say is unreasonable. They argued Thursday that the need for planning and state-level legislation would delay any efforts at compliance until mid-2017 at the very earliest. And the plan under consideration will not even be finalized until this summer.
The EPA seems to be giving in to reality. Its administrator, Gina McCarthy, dropped this week what she called a “big hint” that the short-term deadline will be scrapped.
But the need for such a dramatic change at this late point in the process suggests that something has gone wrong. When the regulation was first promulgated, it already smacked of government arbitrariness. Was “30 percent by 2030” chosen for reasons backed by science, technical feasibility, and cost-benefit analysis, or was it just a pair of nice, round numbers? Likewise, was the 2005 number chosen as the benchmark because it represents something scientifically important, or because it happens to be ten years ago, almost exactly 6 billion metric tons, and a modern high point in carbon emissions (actually the second-highest in history)?
Evidence that fanaticism is trumping science and technical knowledge at the EPA abounds. Among the justifications offered by the plan’s supporters is the preposterous idea that the proposed emissions reductions — including the retention of the short-term 2020 deadlines — will actually change weather patterns and sea-levels significantly enough to save money for state governments.
Oh really? That’s funny, because carbon emissions from electrical generation in 2013 were already down 10 percent from 2005 levels — driven there by recession and by the free market choosing cheaper natural gas over coal power. Will anyone be so daft as to come forward and argue that this reduction has already changed weather patterns or sea levels during that eight-year period? That would be at least as wacky as outright denial that climate change has occurred.
Consider also the apparent exclusion of the federal government’s top regulator of electricity, FERC, from the regulatory process up until now. “Neither I nor my staff participated in meetings or conversations that would support the contention that FERC actively participated in the development of the Clean Power Plan,” Commissioner Tony Clark noted in a letter to Congress last month. “With regard to FERC staff generally, I believe it unreasonable to conclude that FERC meaningfully or substantially participated in the plan’s development.”
Clark added that the commission’s only input involved “a handful of high level, general discussions based on a limited review of only portions of the CPP proposal that were provided to FERC.”
Increasingly, it appears that rules for the serious business of delivering electricity to Americans are being chosen by zealots who — though rich in fears of cataclysmic effects supposedly arising from climate change — evidently lack expertise in how the nation’s electricity is provided. Perhaps Obama made campaign promises and feels he has to follow through, but Americans need energy in both the long and the short term. Ideological fervor alone will not keep the lights burning.
