Utility Dive gives an industry perspective on yesterday’s major news. Following that is a look at where the U.S. and North Carolina are heading in terms of energy emissions. Finally, I provide a brief discussion of the CPP’s expected benefit, which we will now have to learn how to make do without, and a rundown of the CPP’s enormous costs, now averted.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt on Tuesday signed a proposal to repeal the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era rule aimed at slashing carbon emissions from the power sector. …
“The Obama administration pushed the bounds of their authority so far with the CPP that the Supreme Court issued a historic stay of the rule, preventing its devastating effects to be imposed on the American people while the rule is being challenged in court,” Pruitt said in signing the rule. “We are committed to righting the wrongs of the Obama administration by cleaning the regulatory slate.”
Pruitt’s agency did not propose a replacement for the CPP, instead asking industry to help shape the next carbon rule.
“Any replacement rule will be done carefully, properly, and with humility, by listening to all those affected by the rule,” he said.
Market forces, not government edicts, are effectively reducing energy emissions
Meanwhile, energy-based emissions in North Carolina and the United States have been falling all century.
Strangely, media have been completely silent about that despite giving all outward (not to mention shrill) indication for decades that they are keenly interested in it.
Market forces, not government actions nor renewable energy sources, are the reasons for energy-based emissions’ decline across the 21st century.
Lost benefit and averted costs
With the CPP withdrawn, Americans will now have to face the prospect of temperatures in 2100 being 0.018 degrees Celsius higher than they would have been under CPP.
Less than two one-hundredths of one degree warmer by century’s end is a difficult prospect to imagine, and perhaps to some delicate constitutions it sounds like the fate of Toht.
Nevertheless, the offsetting good news is, here are the massive costs that the EPA is no longer planning to force on us:
- imposing at least $366 billion in costs
- hitting residents in 43 states with double-digit percentage increases in their electricity bills
- costing consumers and businesses $41 billion to $73 billion or more for electricity per year
- prematurely shuttering 45,000 megawatts of coal-fired power generation capacity — more than New England’s entire electric generating capacity — and as much as 169,000 megawatts if the EPA cannot legally allow all options it specified for compliance.
- shutting down 68,000 megawatts of fossil fuel electric generating capacity
- creating widespread rotating blackouts in parts of the country