This may be one of the most important things anyone's said yet about the Waxman-Markey climate bill, or ACES. Ken Ward Jr. writing at The Charleston Gazette shares a quote from the communications director of the United Mine Workers of America, Phil Smith:
As it stands now, the amount of money dedicated to coal in this bill is remarkable, and the future of coal will be intact.
I've been working extensively to fashion a controlled program that Congress can adopt which will preserve coal jobs, create the opportunity for increasing coal production and keep electricity rates in regions like Southwest Virginia affordable. The compromise that I have reached with Chairman Waxman achieves those goals.
It doesn't seem unreasonable, as many have pointed out, that industry's weeping and wailing about this bill in public hides the fact that they know it's the best deal they're going to get.
Indeed, the EPA is one of the few government agencies that's done anything constructive to push us away from the destructive, outmoded coal industry. As the indispensible David Sasson reports, they did so just yesterday:
The EPA issued a letter today stating that Sunflower Electric must restart the permit application process if it wants to build an 895 MW coal plant in Kansas, a permit the company thought it had already secured in a back room deal with the governor.
The move by the EPA's Region 7 administrator highlights the ability of the federal Clean Air Act to protect the public health and welfare, despite political horse trading.
Kansas Gov. Mark Parkinson had negotiated a private agreement with Sunflower for construction of the plant, and subsequently the state Legislature made the agreement part of a law that the governor signed on May 22.
Today, however, the EPA informed all stakeholders that the plant still must meet requirements of the Clean Air Act. The agency laid out in detail what those requirements are in a six-page letter (attached below). ...
As Jonathan Dorn noted at Celsias, since a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that the EPA could regulate emissions that contributed to global warming if they determined that climate change endangered public health, and the EPA finding that it does endanger public health, plans for nearly 100 coal plants have been frozen. Others have been fined and forced to add new pollution controls after making significant changes to existing plants.
That's your EPA in action. Before Congress could even get its shoes tied, they'd already set to work forcing polluters to shoulder more of the costs of their toxic waste, rather than letting them shift it onto the rest of us, in the form of poor health and poisoned ecosystems.
A climate preservation bill that strips EPA of enforcement authority is like a crime reduction bill that proposed to gut the criminal courts and fire half the nation's police force.
ACES in its current form has simply weakened its initial emissions targets and taken away too much authority from the EPA. I expect that although it costs virtually nothing in terms of CBO scoring, it will prove the most costly to the health of the American public and the efficacy of the bill. Progressive Rep. Lloyd Doggett made much this same criticism of the bill, but he was then strongarmed into voting for it anyway. Should that be surprising when even though it's far weaker than Obama's initial proposal, Nancy Sutley, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in an interview with Grist in June of this year that coal is likely to stick around, and investing in coal technology is "very important"?
Even more than the free emissions credits, the restraints on the EPA are nothing more than a fabulously lucrative giveaway to the coal industry, a tragedy for everyone who drinks water or breathes air, and it needs to come out of the ACES legislation in the Senate as well as the final conference version.
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