One of the biggest hopes of deniers for Trump’s presidency remains that the administration will overturn the Endangerment Finding, which requires the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Fortunately, the administration still appears reluctant to touch the Finding.The Dirty Power Plan is the latest evidence: if Trump’s team were going to try and overturn the Endangerment Finding, they would simply have repealed the Clean Power Plan and fought the finding in court. But the replacement is an attempt to provide the weakest possible enforcement of the rule, technically meeting its requirements while allowing as much coal as possible.
That’s why one of the biggest problems the Trump administration is likely to face when it defends its Dirty Power Plan in court will be the likelihood that, as Emily Atkin at the New Republic recently pointed out, it actually increases pollution compared to no policy at all.
Atkin’s surprising conclusion comes from a change to something called the New Source Review rule. Meredith Hankins at Legal Planet has a great explainer on the policy, which has something of a storied courtroom history that should worry polluters and offer some hope to the rest of us.
The short version is this: new power plants must meet certain Clean Air Act standards to be built. Plants that were already running before the 1977 Clean Air Act were grandfathered in and allowed to keep running despite their dirtiness. However, the New Source Review required that if any upgrades were made to these plants that resulted in them increasing annual emissions, they’d have to apply for permits and clean up their pollution. The thinking was that if owners were going to improve a plant to run it more, they could also improve their pollution controls.
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Instead of improving the plants, many polluters opted instead to just keep the old plants running as-is. As a result, coal plants built nearly a century ago are still limping along and emitting serious amounts of pollution because making substantial upgrades would require them to also meet stricter pollution requirements.
Industry has long complained about the NSR, contending that they would make efficiency improvements if it weren’t for having to meet NSR requirements.
That’s where Trump’s plan comes in. The Dirty Power Plan attempts to make certain changes to the NSR so that the standard to meet is for a change in the plant’s hourly emission rate, not annual emission amounts. This sounds like a small change, but it can have big repercussions.
Because that the change would allow power plants (particularly the dirtiest, oldest plants) to make upgrades that would let them run for more hours a day or more days a year, without having to install pollution controls to account for the additional emissions since it still emits the same level of pollution per hour. The annual emissions could potentially grow quite a bit- for example, if a coal plant starts running 24 instead of 12 hours a day, it would double its annual emissions, but the hourly emissions would stay the same.
The proposed changes aren’t exactly original. As Ben Storrow at E&E points out, EPA air chief Bill Wehrum proposed a similar idea during his tenure at the agency during the Bush II administration. Wehrum’s idea was ultimately killed in court.
This is a reason for optimism, particularly given Trump’s dismal court record, but it’s probably too early to celebrate. Wehrum, whose list of lobbying clients before joining Trump’s EPA includes the Kochs and API, likely learned some sort of lesson last time he did this. We’ll have to see what, exactly.
Perhaps it’s the “military plan” for coal plants that Trump mentioned on Tuesday. As Bloomberg reported last year, the DoE is also looking at the NSR issue in its work to prop up failing coal plants. Handing dirty plants a bunch of cash to improve will only do so much if they still have to meet the NSR pollution control standards. But, if those regulations are waived, and coal plants are given subsidies, it might be enough to give coal a really worrisome boost.
The Clean Air Task Force’s Ann Weeks told Bloomberg that easing the NSR review without increasing other coal investments would do nothing but “tell the people who live near these facilities and breathe the pollution that they don’t matter.”
That does seem to be Trump’s message to the 1,400 Americans a year the Dirty Power Plan admits it could kill.
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