The White House held a two-day round of meetings this week with a key environmental group leading a national campaign to snuff out coal plants.
White House and Environmental Protection Agency officials met with the Sierra Club, which is leading the Beyond Coal campaign to close coal-fired power plants, to hear its ideas on tightening power plant emission regulations that are part of President Obama’s push to address global warming.
Critics say the rules would make it nearly impossible to build new coal-fired generation in the country.
The meetings are part of the White House Office of Management and Budget’s final review that it must do before the emission regulations become law later this summer.
One of the rules would tighten the amount of greenhouse gas emissions allowed from new power plants, which the coal industry argues would be so cost prohibitive it effectively would ban any new coal plants being built in the U.S. The second rule is for power plants that are significantly updated or modified, requiring strict emission controls.
The rules must be finished before the EPA can finalize the crown jewel of the president’s climate agenda — the Clean Power Plan. The plan regulates existing power plants, and is widely opposed by Republicans, coal states and industry groups as a specious attempt to install a national climate change policy without the approval of Congress.
The rule goes further than any of the other rules, requiring states, not individual power plants, to meet emission reductions set by the EPA. The Clean Power Plan is also undergoing final review by OMB.
The meetings with environmental groups on the new and modified plant rules were held Tuesday and Wednesday, according to the OMB website.
White House officials and the EPA also sat down with a group of companies that make liquid fuels from algae. The Algae Biomass Organization and the company Algenol were at the meeting.
The algae industry says the rules for new power plants could stifle the industry’s growth as it approaches commercialization. Since the tiny microorganisms require a steady diet of carbon dioxide to produce biofuel, the algae industry fears the rules would not give coal plants the proper incentive to sell their carbon to the fuel makers.
Instead, the algae industry fears the EPA would recognize only technologies that capture carbon emissions and inject them underground where they cannot be used in fuel production.
