The fossil fuel fools now in the top reaches of the Environmental Protection Agency rolled out their proposed Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) plan Monday. Just about everything in it, from its propagandistic title to its bare mention of climate change, operates in the realm of the lies and upside-downism we’ve come to expect from the Trump regime. It’s not the full repeal of Obama’s Clean Power Plan without replacement that the grifting former Environmental Policy Agency chief Scott Pruitt first had in mind but gave up on because it would have been dead on arrival in the courts as a consequence of precedent-setting rulings. But it is still a disaster.
David Doniger—a long-time energy activist who served in the Clinton administration’s White House Council on Environmental Quality and several EPA posts, and is now a senior strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council—said that even without a repeal, the Trump plan is clearly a move to “neuter the Clean Air Act as an instrument to curb carbon pollution from power plants.”
The ACE proposal would eviscerate President Obama’s CPP, the years-in-the-making policy to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide pollution from coal-fired electricity-generating plants. Thanks to a 5-4 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, implementation of the CPP has been stayed until state and industry foes of the plan have their day in court. The EPA’s new plan, which would roll back the clock on controlling emissions, will have to pass court muster, too, which could take a long time. Meanwhile, the Trump regime has been doing what it can to prop up the coal industry and telling the nation’s remaining 50,000 coal miners that their lives have already gotten better thanks to the actions of the squatter in the White House.
As NRDC President Rhea Suh said Monday, the new plan “is riddled with gimmicks and giveaways. ... What America needs instead is an even stronger Clean Power Plan, one that will further accelerate the nation’s shift to clean energy. “
Indeed, we do need a stronger plan. But, of course, that means waiting until at least 2021. Yet another friggin’ delay in taking action that ought to have been launched 30 years ago this summer when climatologist James Hansen first testified to Congress on “climate change.”
Almost immediately after Hansen made his case, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established and began its work trying to set the planet on a path toward eliminating emissions that are the main contributors to a warming world. Alas, at the same time, individuals and institutions funded by some of the nation’s leading fossil-fuel interests began spreading their lies about climate science, smeared scientists, attacked the IPCC, and promoted the energy status quo to keep that old bottom line in the black. Some of them, like the Koch brothers and Heartland Institute, are still at it though they have modulated their BS in the face of evidence even they cannot deny.
While not going nearly as far as many environmental advocates say is necessary, and applying an obsolete all-of-the-above energy plan, the Obama administration took more steps to deal with climate change than any president before. For instance, it wasn’t until Obama’s first budget that research into renewables was funded at the same level—adjusted for inflation—as they were in the last budget of President Jimmy Carter three decades previously. Arguably his strongest effort was the Clean Power Plan. But the stimulus wrestled into place in February 2009 ultimately put $61 billion into clean energy-related projects from weatherization to grants for advanced solar cell research.
As if the ACE plan weren’t retrograde enough, in a July memo from the Department of Energy in support of another of the regime’s witless energy moves—rolling back vehicle mileage standards—the Trumpian EPA’s message is essentially that conserving oil no longer matters. The memo, of course, made no mention of climate change. But it does say that increased use of natural gas “affects the need of the nation to conserve energy” and that hydraulic fracturing to free petroleum from shale formations has given “the United States more flexibility than in the past to use our oil resources with less concern”:
But Tom Kloza, an oil analyst with the Maryland-based Oil Price Information Service, said: “It’s like saying, ‘I’m a big old fat guy, and food prices have dropped—it’s time to start eating again.’ If you look at it from the other end, if you do believe that fossil fuels do some sort of damage to the atmosphere ... you come up with a different viewpoint. There’s a downside to living large.”
Of course, if you don’t believe in human-caused climate change, which is true of many of Trump’s top minions and at least half the Republican members of Congress, then there is no downside. They ignore growing worldwide climate impacts that are already killing people. But then lots of these fellows no doubt think they’ll be dead before anything serious happens where they live, or figuring they and their ilk can just move to higher ground, without taking into account myriad other effects of a warming world that have nothing to do with sea-level rise.
They also figure they can keep driving whatever guzzler gives them the most pleasure and prestige because they’ll be in the cemetery before anyone can hold them to account.
Instead of pushing policies that move us away from our oil addiction while protecting the most vulnerable Americans during the transition away from the internal combustion engine, the nation is now afflicted with federal leadership that acts as if this were the 1950s. A few municipalities and a handful of states—Hawai’i, California, New York—are moving in the right direction. But while they can deliver model policies for others and benefits for their citizens, they cannot achieve the 100 percent renewables goal in a vacuum.
Instead of the myopic idiocy now being foisted on us, we need policies that end the burning of coal and oil by the 2050s. That means a huge shift toward electrification, which means passing an industrial plan with that as the goal.
It cannot be stressed enough that building only renewable power plants, manufacturing only vehicles powered by electricity or fuel-cells, and initiating steps to eliminate agricultural contributions to the emissions will not stop the climate changes already on the way as a consequence of 250 years of fossil fuel-fired industrialization.
It’s no secret to anyone paying attention that the changes we are already seeing coming at us far faster than scientists thought 30, 20, 10, or even 5 years ago are going to get worse even if we adopt draconian policies. That doesn’t mean we should give up. We have a choice between adopting policies that will reduce the impacts of the coming changes or that will exacerbate them. The Trump regime has made clear, this week, and for the past 19 months, which path it plans to travel. And if the unindicted co-conspirator in the White House gets indicted, we can expect nothing better from Mike Pence or Paul Ryan if they wind up sitting in the big chair of the Oval Office.
What we ought to be hearing from Democrats is full-throated support for climate change actions that provide clean-energy jobs, improve people’s health, stress ramped-up international cooperation in controlling emissions, and offer our children and grandchildren and the generations that follow something far better than the hardscrabble life they will face if these assorted profiteers and know-nothings continue to set policy.