Juliet Eiperin
writes:
The Environmental Protection Agency will issue the first limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants as early as Tuesday, according to several people briefed on the proposal. The move could end the construction of conventional coal-fired facilities in the United States.
The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt[-hour], meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt[-hour]. [...]
The EPA rule, called the New Source Performance Standard, will be subject to public comment for at least a month before being finalized, but its backers said they were confident that the White House will usher it into law before Obama’s term ends.
So what does that mean? Existing coal-fired power plants will continue operations. But natural gas-fired operations which can easily meet the new standards (43 percent lower than existing coal plants) will, along with wind, solar, geothermal and other renewables, be supplanting any new coal-fueled power plants. The rule, if finalized, obviously could also make the building of nuclear power plants more likely.
More natural gas will mean more hydraulic fracturing—"fracking"—the high-pressure injection of fluids to extend cracks in tight rock formations containing the fuel. That process has its own environmental problems, including the potential for earthquakes and tainted water supplies. These are far less hazardous than the damage from mining and burning coal, however. Burning coal not only adds vast amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere each year, but it also kills thousands of people, 15,000 a year in the United States alone just from fine particulates, according to the Clean Air Task Force.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2005:
President Bush broke his public silence on Saturday about the deadliest U.S. school shooting in six years, touting the government's response "at this tragic time" after some American Indian leaders complained he paid little attention to the rampage.
Bush's delayed public reaction to the shooting stood in contrast to his swift and high-profile intervention this week to prolong the life of Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman in Florida whose feeding tube was removed.
Bush's "culture of life" applies only to those subjects that interest the Religious Right. And the American Taliban won't concern itself too much with a poor Native American killing nine and himself at his school.
Tweet of the Day:
SCOTUS trying to decide if health care mandate is something that is unambiguously legal & constitutional, like torture.
— @FrankConniff via web
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