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Trump administration rule will boost the coal industry

"It's a rule to increase emission because it's a rule to extend the life of coal plants," said Conrad Schneider of the Clean Air Task Force. "You invest in updating an old coal plant, it makes it more economic to run it more to pay off that investment/"

• https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-epa-weaken-clean-power-20190619-story.html

• https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/climate/epa-coal-emissions.html

Trump EPA finalizes rollback of key Obama climate rule that targeted coal plants

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/trump-epa-finalizes-rollback-of-key-obama-climate-rule-that-targeted-coal-plants/2019/06/19/b8ff1702-8eeb-11e9-8f69-a2795fca3343_story.html

The U.S. electricity sector needs to cut its emissions 74 percent over 2005 levels by 2030 to avoid hitting the 2-degree mark, according to the International Energy Agency.

Overall, the country must slash greenhouse gas emissions 48 percent by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency's Brent Wanner, with the deepest cuts coming from the power sector because cheap alternatives to coal are readily available.

Jason Bordoff, founding director of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, in an interview said that his group had found that more aggressive action by U.S. officials such as a nationwide carbon tax of $50 per ton could cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent over the next decade.

“Market forces don’t do that by themselves,” Bordoff said. “You need regulations.”

A paper published this year by researchers at Harvard, Boston University and Syracuse University, as well as Resources for the Future, said that the agency’s new rule might increase efficiency at individual coal plants, but then they might end up operating more frequently and for a longer time.

The researchers found that as many as 28 percent of the plants affected could actually produce higher overall emissions in 2030...

The Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) proposed replacement of the Clean Power Plan (CPP), targets heat rate improvements (HRIs) at individual coal plants in the US. Due to greater plant efficiency, such HRIs could lead to increased generation and emissions, known as an emissions rebound effect... (the Trump EPA replacement, ACE) is expected to increase the number of operating coal plants and amount of coal-fired electricity generation...

(Associated Press) Obama EPA head Gina McCarthy said Trump officials had "made painfully clear that they are incapable of rising to the challenge and tackling this crisis. They have shown a callous disregard for EPA's mission, a pattern of climate science denial and an inexcusable indifference to the consequences of climate change."

Burning of fossil fuels for electricity, transportation and heat is the main human source of heat-trapping carbon emissions.

Trump has rejected scientific warnings on climate change, including a dire report this year from scientists at more than a dozen federal agencies noting that global warming from fossil fuels "presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life." Administration officials argue climate science is imperfect, and that it's not clear climate change would have as great an impact as forecast...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the change as a "dirty power scam" and "a stunning giveaway to big polluters." She called climate change "the existential threat of our time" and said the administration was ignoring scientific studies and yielding to special interests.

"The Trump administration's outrageous Dirty Power Scam is a stunning giveaway to big polluters, giving dirty special interests the greenlight to choke our skies, poison our waters, and worsen the climate crisis."

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