This blog is part of a Friends of the Earth series analyzing the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. To see the other posts, visit our website. To write comments on how to improve the plan, click here.
The Obama administration has finally announced new rules to tackle the largest single contributor to climate change in the United States: carbon emissions from power plants. The headlines after the release were that the rules will reduce power plant carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent from their 2005 levels.
But why start in 2005? Does this make a big difference? Yes, it turns out it does.
According to the Energy Information Administration, 2005 was a watermark year for pollution in the U.S. The economy was still humming along, and the electricity sector had its second-worst year on record for metric tons of carbon from coal emissions. In fact, overall electricity generation was responsible for 2,417 million metric tons of carbon dioxide—more than it had ever produced before and more than it has produced since.
Fast forward to 2012. The economy is still sluggish, renewables and energy efficiency measures are coming online and coal is being challenged by cheaper and debatably cleaner natural gas. The result is almost a 20 percent decline in electricity-related carbon emissions from their high in 2005, creating a low not seen since the mid-1990s.
Why would the Obama administration draw the line in 2005 and not 2012? After all, reducing 2012 emissions by 30 percent leads to much lower overall emissions than reducing the 2005 level by the same percentage. The difference between the two baselines leads to a difference in reductions of more than 250 million metric tons of carbon by 2030. That’s equivalentto taking over 50 million cars off the road or not burning a quarter billion pounds of coal.
To be clear, the rule does not use the emissions level from 2005 to mandate cuts. The rule bases its reduction targets on 2012 levels. The 30 percent by 2030 number comes from adding together the EPA’s individual state targets and then measuring those reductions against 2005. But the EPA has consistently advertised the rule using the 2005 baseline and this rhetoric speaks volumes about how limited its ambitions really are.
Reaching the 2030 target based on 2005 levels only requires a 17 percent overall reduction from 2013 levels. By lowering the bar, the Obama administration is simultaneously setting an easier target and positioning itself to take credit when the target is reached. In other words, the president would like to begin a marathon more than one-third of the way past the starting line and then celebrate when he runs a record time.
This policy is at best lazy and at worst dishonest, especially since the rule is radically under-ambitious at building a more sustainable energy mix through efficiency standards and renewables. The rule could be twice as ambitious about reducing overall emissions from the power sector and remain achievable. At the state level, where the reduction targets are implemented and enforced, the World Resources Institute has identified at least ten states where the EPA has set the target well below what could reasonably be achieved.
The choice between 2005 and 2012 obscures a bigger question: why not go for even lower emissions and use the 1990 baseline outlined in the Kyoto Protocol? This would mean a much sharper drop of 37 percent from 2012 levels. If the Obama administration is serious about reclaiming the mantle of global climate leadership, reducing emissions from the benchmark agreed upon by nearly every other industrialized country is the logical place to start. Setting timid targets serves no one, and a global climate deal that includes crucial countries like China and India requires nothing less than a demonstration of seriousness from the country that bears the most historical blame for climate change.