Protecting the Clean Air Act: Getting the jobs and investment story right
Posted September 13, 2010 in Solving Global Warming
With stalled clean energy legislation in DC, opponents of environmental protection have shifted their focus away from pro-active legislation toward dismantling existing environmental protection laws. Against the Supreme Court’s mandate, industry-funded politicians and the lobbyists that support them (e.g. National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)) are trying to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from doing its job: requiring polluters to reduce global warming pollution. Predictably, they are making the same argument they’ve always made—one that’s never come true: “Protecting the environment will destroy jobs; it will be impossible for firms to meet any new requirements and stay in business at the same time.”
On three counts (and there are many more), the facts simply do not substantiate this dangerous politics of fear:
1. There is a positive relationship between job growth and environmental protection.
As I’ve documented many times, decades of environmental protection laws demonstrate that pitting jobs against the environment presents a false choice (click here and here). In fact, as EPA approaches its 40th birthday (December 2, 2010), we can celebrate an economy with a GDP 3 times its 1970 size, household incomes that are on average 45% higher, the creation of tens of thousands of jobs in the environmental protection industry, and tens of thousands of lives saved from a cleaned up environment. At the same time, regulated power plants’ electricity rates declined, contrary to industry and even EPA forecasts. A compelling new study on recent regulation on coal-fired power plants tells the exact same story (click here for a summary and analysis).
2. Industry hyperbole aside, the EPA has historically only required emission controls where they are available and affordable, and only on large source polluters.
For decades, EPA has a proven track record of implementing regulations that work, and there is no reason to expect they won’t work for greenhouse gases as well.
3. Current controls on carbon emissions at the state level are creating jobs, reducing energy bills, and lowering carbon emissions.
Forging ahead in the absence of Federal leadership, some states have already begun charging polluters for their emissions, using the revenues to invest in clean energy solutions and energy efficiency—putting people to work, saving taxpayer dollars and creating new small business opportunities. Under an agreement called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a group of Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states have so far raised $308 million, and used the proceeds to help homes and businesses expand energy efficiency programs. The result: consumers saved more than $900 million across the RGGI region. What’s more, these programs drove energy prices down (hmm, sound familiar?), as lower energy consumption reduced wholesale electric prices by 40-50%. And, perhaps most importantly, RGGI has promoted pollution control programs that have cost-effectively reduced carbon pollution by about 30% from business-as-usual. For more detail, click here, here and here for more RGGI success stories.
The bottom line:
Every line of evidence points to the same conclusion. Allowing EPA to do what it is legally required to do (protect public health from dangerous pollution) will not cost us jobs or damage the economy. In fact, there’s every reason to believe the opposite.
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Comments
Carbonicus — Sep 13 2010 10:32 PM
Laurie, in your lead you write "industry-funded politicians and the lobbyists that support them...are trying to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from doing its job: requiring polluters to reduce GLOBAL WARMING POLLUTION" (emphasis added).
In the feature topic lead web page "Feature: Defending the Clean Air Act", the page states, "but now some Senators and House members are attacking the Clean Air Act and threatening to interfere with the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases and enforce the CLEANUP OF POLLUTING POWER PLANTS (emphasis added). Congress should never undermine the Clean Air Act or EPA's ability to hold big polluters accountable for the DESTRUCTIVE POLLUTION (emphasis added) they release into our air".
With regard to the former a) let's be fair. the green lobby has outspent the "dirty energy" lobby by factors, if not orders of magnitude, on "climate change" legislation, b) CO2 is not pollution. It does not directly harm human health and the environment. Sans the Thermageddon, sea level rise, and 20 Katrinas per year hyperbole (none of which are credible), there is every scientific argument to be made that added CO2 is as good for the biosphere as it is bad (e.g. crop production and total biomass production, part of which feeds the world and part of which is habitat for species). And please do not argue "the Supreme Court said so". They didn't. They said EPA had an obligation to make a full determination under the CAA. Which they did. In error. As we shall soon see.
With regard to the latter, the efforts in Congress you are twisting do not involve the regulation and "cleanup" of polluting power plants. Not one element of the effort would weaken, eliminate, or otherwise effect the regulation of key airborne contaminants such as PM2.5, PM10, mercury, SO2, NOX, etc. As a conservative working in the environmental industry for 20+ years, I know these things cause tens of thousands of avoidable cases of respiratory conditions and thousands of excess deaths each year in the population. CO2? Not so much. Not even one. Unless you want to count the suicide by cop incident at the Discovery Channel a couple of week ago.
There is not a single conservative in Congress who stands for weakening the provisions of the CAA that are responsible for the improvements in air quality you mentioned (and many, many others you didn't). Not one. What these conservatives stand against - as do a number of Democrats (either intelligent ones or those afraid of losing their jobs, or both) - is using the CAA to regulate a harmless trace gas without which you would not be reading this post right now. As a long time hard green environmentalist (as opposed to an ideological environmental hyperbole propaganda machine), I am offended that anyone would try to equate the risk to human health and the environment from CO2 with that from mercury or other CAA pollutants, thereby diverting resources that could and should be used to reduce the latter, real threats.
With regard to your three points:
1) there is a relationship up to a point. that point ends where real, harmful pollutants are brought under control. but there won't be tens of thousands of jobs "cleaning up" CO2, unless you count the new wind and solar power hardware jobs the policies for which you have advocated are creating in China. That's where your "green jobs" are. And there won't be tens of thousands of lives saved from regulating or even eliminating CO2. In fact, there won't be a single one.
2) CAA NAAQS requires that "hazardous air pollutants" (a misnomer CO2 now enjoys courtesy of the soon-to-be-shot-down Endangerment Finding) be regulated if they exceed 250 tons/year. The attempt at a "tailoring rule" to do this is nice, but a) EPA doesn't have the authority to do it, and b) the green lobby has no intention of limiting this to coal fired power plants. Further, some of EPA's programs have had demonstrably positive benefits relative to cost, others not so much. 2/3 of every CERCLA dollar goes to attorneys and consultants (the "tens of thousands of jobs in the environmental industry" to which you refer), not to clean up sites.
3) several states are attempting to get out of RGGI. What has happened to the retail price of electricity? Carbon allowances and renewable solar and wind energy cost much more than coal, nat gas, or nuke. Consumers pay these added costs. And none of these renewables will make one bit of difference to the earth's climate. It's an ice age you need to be worried about. Check with your local anthropologist.
Here's the long and short of it. You are misleading people about conservative attempts to weaken the CAA. And CO2 regulation won't change the planet's climate.
All credible analyses of Kyoto-like schemes show that they stand the chance of reducing planetary average temperatures by about .20 degrees C by the year 2100. Maybe .30 degrees if China and India and Russia and Brazil sign up for Kyoto-like energy and economic retardation. Which they've made clear all along they won't (nor should they, until they pull about 1.5 billion out of poverty - see environmental kuznets curve, please). China builds a new coal fired power plant every 2 weeks.
This "benefit" at a cost of 1-4% of GDP. ANNUALLY, not once. US GDP is currently approx. $14 trillion, so we're talking about $140 billion/year at the low end of the range.
Tell me. Even with all the progress made to clean up the US environment over the last 3 decades, we both agree there are pressing environmental issues that are deleterious to human health, species, and ecosystems which need our immediate attention. So how you can justify $140 BILLION PER YEAR to regulate CO2, knowing that best case scenario is that we will have avoided a quarter of a degree of "warming" 89 years from now, and amount which cannot even be differentiated from natural climate variability?
I appreciate the good "hard green" (read Huber's book by the same title...you need it) work NRDC has done over the years. But portraying the effort to stop EPA from regulating CO2 as an ill-intended attempt to weaken the regulation of real pollution THAT ACTUALLY HARMS people is intentionally misleading and, in a word, shameless.
Every dollar expended chasing the phantom menace CO2 (code for a restrictor plate on capitalism, greater control over means of production, wealth redistribution, CO2 emissions credit handouts to companies that capitulated, etc.) is a dollar wasted that could've been used to address the REAL POLLUTION problems facing America. Air, soil, surfacewater, groundwater, drinking water, CERCLA/RCRA/brownfield sites, I could go on for days.
But I don't need to. You are wed to your ideology. Facts don't matter. Nor does it matter that western governments have spent $100 billion over the last 10 years studying "climate change". Tell me, what good could have been done for humanity and the environment for $100 BILLION?
Remember this. At the end of the day, the laws of physics and economics do not yield to political ideology. And Mother Nature laughs at humans and our "footprints". Again, check with your local university's anthropology (and maybe geology) department.
I wish the environmental movement would get back to feverish advocacy for environmental issues that matter to humans, wildlife, and ecosystems.
Grace Phillips — Sep 19 2010 01:25 PM
Dear Carbonicus - I can not be bothered to read such a long comment from someone who does not bother to give us their proper name. Is Carbonicus like Madonna? A single name so famous that no other is needed?
It seems more like Mama's skirts for someone who is not prepared to take responsibility for their comments.
Best,
Grace Phillips