Despite Right-Wing Noise, Coal-Burning Cuts Bring Big Benefits
[Updated 4:01 p.m., with link quoting 30% goal by 2030. Further updated, 9:50 p.m.]
The US Environmental Protection Agency will release on Monday its long-awaited plan to bring about a reduction in the amount of polluting coal that utilities burn to generate electricity.
According to The White House Blog:
Today, as part of the President’s Climate Action Plan, the EPA proposed new carbon pollution standards for power plants. These standards represent a commonsense proposal that will have huge benefits for all Americans. In fact, for every dollar of investment spurred by this proposal, there is roughly seven dollars’ worth of health benefits in return.Right-wing talk radio and its energy-sector special interest allies will tell you that this means the sky will fall, that we will be plunged into darkness and joblessness - - just as they told you in earlier End Times That Did Not Happen that the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, Medicare, vehicle emission standards and the US Surgeon General's Report on Smoking would shred the Constitution, kill jobs, or force us to pedal one-speed bikes to work wearing Mao jackets.
What the EPA's plan will do is give the states - - note that, please - - substantial flexibility to hit modest carbon-emission reduction targets and thus reduce the massive tonnage of noxious gases that are warming and changing the climate, drying the Great Plains and igniting the US West, melting the glaciers, raising sea levels, turning hurricanes into costly, killer super storms and poisoning your kids and grandparents' lungs.
Here's an example, posted tonight, on The Washington Post website, about climate-change influenced high tides routinely flooding Virginia.
Now.
The Washington Post's Greg Sargent has posted a solid analysis of the proposal's political impacts.
Im Wisconsin, I would expect Gov. Scott Walker to use the proposal as accelerant against the President as he did over Obamacare, federally-paid Medicaid expansion or the Amtrak train line to Madison and now-shuttered Milwaukee-based assembly plant which Walker killed to boost his national anti-Obama role, standing with corporate funders and Tea Party cred.
But Walker made his energy conservation responsibilities and Wisconsin's compliance more difficult because he obstructed clean-air, job-creating wind farm construction, and reduced state government energy conservation programming and other initiatives designed to reduce carbon emissions.
His hand-picked "chamber-of-commerce"leadership at the DNR has not updated the agency's climate change page since June 18, 2012 - - a fact I have cited on this blog often, along with notices that the agency had scrubbed content and links after Walker's election because they noted the work of the Doyle administration, Walker's go-to-excuse.
Walker did not set the state on a greener path and worse, already took the Koch brothers-inspired pro-fossil-fuels' pledge.
And they already have our Sen. Ron Johnson in their pocket.
7 comments:
Yes, and development of altrernative energy source creates more jobs and generates more industry than the same old pipelines; and turning away from filthy sources like deep well and tar sands, saves even more money in environmental degradation, not to mention the cost of the health damages.
These people are spreading FUD in the service of greedy energy companies who refuse to see the opportunities in transitioning to other sources of energy.
It's indeed a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it appears Governor Scott Walker is paving the way for the Enbridge pipeline to become "Plan B" for the Keystone XL Pipeline (should Obama have the courage to veto it).
Ignoring the "Left-Right" Paradigm in the argument over burning coal, what happens in the US matters very little globally as others aspire to live "The American Dream" and will burn any coal that we won't. Limits to Growth addressed the problem in the 1970's and Homo Colossus is headed towards NTE. (near term extinction)
As Dr. Guy McPherson notes, it is now already too late, the Clathrate Gun has been fired, the feed back loops are accelerating the rate of change, and with a 40 year time lag between event and effects, it is already too late. Might as well burn the last of the Coal to maintain Industrial Civilization, as it is all we know anyways. Come to terms, and party until the end.
Those who say "alternate energy" will save us are deceived and don't understand the problems. All those technologies are still dependent upon fossil fuel inputs and continued environmentally destructive practices.
Wind Energy? Still dependent upon many destructive practices, including the mining and refining of rare earths, requiring large inputs of fossil fuel. In fact, new studies show they may actually be energy sinks - they never produce more energy over their lifespan than the input energy it took to make and maintain them. They are NO answer.
To address the issue of Crude and Natural Gas, you need to properly understand the present situation, which is not the story that the mainstream media is spinning. The US is not headed towards energy independence or exporting fossil fuels or natural gas - we are importing large amounts still - and will be - until America is flat broke.
Beginning of the End? Oil Companies Cut Back on Spending
Steve Kopits recently gave a presentation explaining our current predicament: the cost of oil extraction has been rising rapidly (10.9% per year) but oil prices have been flat. Major oil companies are finding their profits squeezed, and have recently announced plans to sell off part of their assets in order to have funds to pay their dividends. Such an approach is likely to lead to an eventual drop in oil production.
Continued...
We are still right on schedule, as Richard C. Duncan, Ph.D. noted in 1996, Sliding Towards a Post-Industrial Stone Age.
In 1989, I concluded that the life-expectancy of Industrial Civilization is horridly short. This hypothesis was defined in terms of a measurable index, world energy-use per person, and named the "transient-pulse theory of Industrial Civilization." I sketched its maximum point at 1990, followed by a persistent decline (see Note 1).
The Cornucopians, who ignore these facts always hope for a technological miracle that will reverse the inevitable slide to NTE.
Industrialization: Prelude to Collapse
by William Catton
NEW ECOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDINGS
CIRCUMSTANCE: The Age of Exuberance is over, population has already overshot carrying capacity, and prodigal Homo sapiens has drawn down the world's savings deposits.
CONSEQUENCE: All forms of human organization and behavior that are based on the assumption of limitlessness must change to forms that accord with finite limits.
As Jay Hanson notes in his new work:
OVERSHOOT LOOP:
Evolution Under The Maximum
Power Principle
We are “political” animals from birth until death. Everything we do or say can be seen as part of lifelong political agendas. Despite decades of scientific warnings, we continue to destroy our life-support system because that behavior is part of our inherited (DNA/RNA) hard wiring. We use scientific warnings, like all inter-animal communications, for cementing group identity and for elevating one’s own status (politics).
Only physical hardship can force us to rewire our mental agendas. I am certainly not the first to make the observation, but now, after 20 years of study and debate, I am totally certain. The “net energy principle” guarantees that our global supply lines will collapse. The rush to social collapse cannot be stopped no matter what is written or said. Humans have never been able to intentionally-avoid collapse because fundamental system-wide change is only possible after the collapse begins.
What about survivors? Within a couple of generations, all lessons learned from the collapse will be lost, and people will revert to genetic baselines. I wish it weren’t so, but all my experience screams “it’s hopeless.” Nevertheless, all we can do is the best we can and carry on...
Ecocide - It's in our genes.
We are coming out of an Ice Age people ,it`s going to get warmer every year and nothing can change that .We are 15 degrees cooler (avg. planet temp 60)than the known high of the last post Ice Age (avg. temp 75)
We would be coming over to the next ice age if not for manmade greenhouse warming. Milankovich cycles. Look them up.
I am still waiting for my health insurance premiums to decrease $2,500, and we are supposed to believe anything are campaigner and chief has to say?
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