Last December, the EPA issued a final rule setting the levels for mercury and other pollutants from utility power plants. The agency said meeting the standards would cost $10 billion a year, but it valued the benefits at $90 billion.
The EPA said the rule would “save thousands of lives and prevent more than 100,000 heart and asthma attacks each year while providing important health protections to the most vulnerable, such as children and older Americans.”
Yes, the EPA conceded, some older coal-fired power plants would have to close, but the utilities had been given more than enough time to fit them with pollution control equipment or find other sources of power generation.
Who wouldn’t be for cleaner air and saving lives? But, as always, it’s not that simple.
United Mine Workers of America President Cecil Roberts was among the seven labor union leaders who sent a letter to President Obama this week asking him to reconsider the rule.
Roberts, in a subsequent op-ed piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, argues that the new, tougher standards will result in the premature closing of a number of power plants that provide up to 56,000 megawatts of electricity generating capacity.
And that means putting people out of work.
“We told the EPA that as many as 54,000 direct jobs were at risk in the utility, mining and rail transport sectors, in addition to 200,000 jobs in related industries and communities impacted by the plant closures,” Roberts wrote. “But the EPA ignored our concerns.”
Additionally, Roberts says the EPA rule contained a “poison pill” that will discourage any future construction of coal-fired power plants. He says the emission standards are so stringent that “equipment suppliers will not guarantee the ability of control technologies to meet them.”
Meanwhile, there are questions about whether the Obama Administration and the EPA have over-hyped the benefits of the new emission standards. The Feb. 18 edition of The Economist carried a story with the headline, “Rule-making is being made to look more beneficial under Barack Obama.”
The Economist reports, “reduced mercury explained none of the purported future reduction in deaths, heart attacks and asthma, and less than 0.01% of the monetary benefits. Instead, almost all the benefits came from concomitant reductions in a pollutant that was not the target of the rule: namely, fine particles.”
However, the fine particles are already regulated, and the Obama Administration’s office of Information and Regulatory Affairs liberally interprets the benefits from cutting those emissions further.
“The EPA routinely claims additional benefits from reducing those concentrations well below levels that current law considers safe,” said The Economist. “That is dubious: a lack of data makes it much harder to know the effects of such low concentrations.”
Questionable, or down right misleading assumptions are not unique to the Obama Administration. Presidents routinely manipulate data coming out of their administration to reinforce their particular argument.
In the case of the mercury rule, however, it appears President Obama’s EPA is wielding its considerable power to make it so difficult for utilities to burn coal that they’ll give up altogether, abandoning any future plans to build coal-fired power plants.
The Obama Administration consistently talks about an “all-of-the-above” approach to the country’s energy policy. But the mercury rule, as well as other actions by this administration, makes it clear that coal is a notable exception.