The EPA’s recently announced Affordable Clean Energy rule, replacing former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, is the most significant shift towards energy sanity in more than a decade. And it’s driving Democrats crazy.
President Trump’s new rule finally swings the pendulum back from the moment in 2007 when former President George W. Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act. The absurd aim of that bill was to replace oil from the ground with energy grown from plants.
California governor Jerry Brown, whose state is legislating for 100 percent renewable energy by 2045, blasted the rule change, calling it ” A declaration of war against America and all of humanity.” Delaware Democratic Sen. Tom Carper said it would send clean energy jobs to China, oblivious to the reality that Democrats’ war on coal is already doing exactly that.
Climate scientists are also losing their minds. Forget the Mueller probe, Ben Santer, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, blogged. There is no doubting the Trump administration’s complicity in a much more serious offense – “the failure to acknowledge, address and mitigate the risks of human-caused climate change.”
But Santer got his facts wrong. There’s no scientific disagreement. The impact assessment accompanying the affordable energy rule does indeed acknowledge that greenhouse gas emissions impose costs on society. The new rule’s real and important change is that it finally constrains the scope of power station emissions regulation to within current law.
The Clean Power Plan was based on a legally questionable expansion of the Clean Air Act. This is why, in February 2016, the Supreme Court granted a stay on its implementation. The plan’s egregious re-interpretation of the term “best system of emissions reduction” meant that a coal plant could be shuttered because its emissions do not match those of a zero-emission wind turbine. The new rule restores legal certainty by restricting the “best system emissions reduction” standard to only what can be done within the fence-line of existing facilities.
Savvier critics can’t make up their minds about the impact of EPA regulation on coal. Jason Bordoff, who worked in the Obama administration as director of energy and climate on the NSC, says natural gas, not regulation, caused coal’s decline, but adds that regulation is still needed “even if the market shifts.” What he really wants is a souped up version of the Clean Power Plan and even more draconian emissions cuts. “That reality is understood by the American public,” Bordoff contends.
The problem is that, as polling has long shown, Americans just don’t rate climate change as much of a pressing concern. This is why, Just as happened previously with the acid rain scare, the justification has to be shifted away from alleged damage to the environment toward concern for public health and safety. Right on cue, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., tweeted straight from the People vs. Polluting Corporations progressive playbook that the Trump administration has “chosen the profits of polluters over public health and safety.”
This is why 96.4 percent of the billed alleged benefits of the Clean Power Plan have nothing to do with climate. They are instead highly speculative health co-benefits that have nothing to do with carbon emissions. Only 3.6 percent of the benefits are now modeled to come from improvements to the American climate. But if non-carbon coal plant emissions are genuinely injurious to public health, economics teaches that the efficient approach is to tackle them directly and not use them as cover to justify cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. As Bill Wehrum, EPA Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation, observes, EPA has “abundant legal authority” to regulate harmful non-carbon dioxide emissions directly.
Moreover, the alleged health co-benefits might well be largely fictitious. A 2007 Canadian review of the literature on air pollution and respiratory illness found a wide range of contradictory results, and suggested that model calibration estimates were “inherently opportunistic.” And EPA is cleaning up made-to-measure studies to justify regulatory activism with a new rule requiring regulation be based on reproducible science.
All this shows that Democrats have yet to understand the contribution of their war on coal to their loss of the White House. Americans want cheap American energy, and that’s exactly what Trump is giving them. A draft report commissioned by energy secretary Rick Perry on boosting coal exports by the National Coal Council points out that the U.S. has one fourth of the world’s coal reserves. Last year, American coal exports leapt 61 percent, overtaking Colombia as the world’s fourth largest coal exporter, though still lagging behind Indonesia, Australia and Russia.
The report finds American coal mining jobs are still threatened by the hangover from a 2013 directive signed by President Obama restricting financial support for construction of new coal-fired plants overseas. A number of multilateral development banks, notably the World Bank, implemented financing bans. The Canadian-led Powering Past Coal Alliance, a group that includes California, is committed to further restricting finance for coal-fired plants in developing countries.
And so because the U.S. is the World Bank’s largest contributor, American taxpayer dollars are being used to wage war on American coal and subsidize China’s solar industry. It leaves the field open to America’s rivals — China alone is planning to provide up to $72bn of financing for new coal plants in developing countries, and not only that but it plans to use this aid as leverage to spread its regime’s influence.
It is hard to think of anything more damaging to the interests of the world’s poor than denying them access to cheap, reliable energy. Gov. Brown and Democrats have declared war not just on coal but on humanity. The sooner this truth is widely understood, the sooner Republicans in states that Trump carried in 2016 can win in November and end the war on coal.
Rupert Darwall is the author of Green Tyranny: Exposing the totalitarian roots of the Climate Industrial Complex (Encounter Books, 2017).
