Is That A Power Plant On The Park Horizon?
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is on the verge of implementing new air quality rules that will make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas, according to rank-and-file agency scientists and park managers who oppose the plan.
The regulations, which are likely to be completed this summer, rewrite a provision of the Clean Air Act that applies to “Class 1 areas,” federal lands that have the highest level of protection under the law. Opponents predict the changes will worsen visibility at many prized tourist destinations, including Utah’s Zion, Virginia’s Shenandoah and Colorado’s Mesa Verde national parks.
Nearly a year ago, with little fanfare, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed changing the way the government measures air pollution near Class 1 areas on the grounds that the nation needed a more uniform way of regulating emissions near protected areas.
Jeffrey Holmstead, who now heads the environmental strategies group at the law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani, helped initiate the rule change while heading the EPA’s air and radiation office. He said agency officials became concerned that the EPA’s scientific staff was taking “the most conservative approach” in predicting how much pollution new power plants would produce.
“The question from a policy perspective was: Do you need to have models based on the absolute worst-case conditions that were unlikely to ever occur in the real world?” Holmstead said in an interview Thursday.
The initiative is the latest in a series of administration efforts dating to 2003 to weaken air quality protections at national parks, including failed moves to prohibit federal land managers from commenting on permits for new pollution sources more than 31 miles away from their areas.
For 30 years, regulators have measured pollution levels in the parks, over both three-hour and 24-hour increments, to capture increases in emissions during peak energy demand. The new rule would average the levels over a year so that the increases would not violate the law.
A slew of National Park Service and EPA officials have challenged the rule change, arguing that it will worsen visibility in already-impaired areas, according to internal documents obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
The EPA’s computer modeling staff wrote that the proposal “would allow for significant degradation” of the parks’ air quality. An e-mail from National Park Service staff called aspects of the plan “bad public policy” that would “make it much easier to build power plants” near Class 1 areas.
When committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) asked the EPA whether the rule would facilitate construction of more power plants near protected areas, Robert Meyers, principal deputy assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, replied in an April 24 letter that this was not the intention but he could not rule it out.
“We developed this proposal based on the need to clarify how increment consumption must be addressed, and not whether or not it would be easier to build power plants,” Meyers wrote. “In the absence of any data or evidence provided by the National Parks Service, we are unable to conclusively confirm or deny their suggestion.”
On Thursday, the National Parks Conservation Assn., an advocacy group, issued a report estimating that the rule would ease the way for the construction of 28 power plants within 186 miles of 10 national parks. In each of the next 50 years, the report concludes, the new plants would emit a total of 122 million tons of carbon dioxide, 79,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, 52,000 tons of nitrogen oxides and 4,000 pounds of toxic mercury into the air over and around the Great Smoky Mountains, Zion and eight other national parks.
“It’s like if you’re pulled over by a cop for going 75 miles per hour in a 55-miles-per-hour zone, and you say, ‘If you look at how I’ve driven all year, I’ve averaged 55 miles per hour,’ ” said Mark Wenzler, director of the National Parks Conservation Assn.’s clean air programs. “It allows you to vastly underestimate the impact of these emissions.”
© 2008 The Washington Post
Summer is the peak period for polluting emissions, ecosystem growth rates and park visitations. The proposed annual average measurements obscure the peak emissions and their damage upon the ecosystem growth processes and on human cardio-pulmonary systems of the park visitors. Also the degrading of park aesthetics affect the general well-being of the visitors, who expect to see some beautiful views. Parks such as Shenandoah are natural settings for haze and tend to collect these emissions during summer.
We shouldn’t be building any coal fired plants anywhere. Period.
Its time to cap CO2 emissions and have hard targets for reducing them. No cap and trade BS. Pay someone to plant a tree or buy “green electricity” if it makes you feel good, but CO2 emissions have to verifiably start on the way down now. Even if we have to ration electricity and build nuclear stations.
I fear you are wasting your fingers writing sensible things like that here ~BBR 001~, most of what I’ve seen here at Common Dreams lately, most of the real progressives have left this site and now we have a lot of trolls who deny global warmng, etc.
Notice the “large” number of comments here on a serious issue?
KEM PATRICK May 16th, 2008 7:06 pm wrote:
>>Notice the “large” number of comments here on a serious issue?<<
OK, I’ll take a bite. Let’s all get active. On a personal level I am doing my part where I can. I’ve cut down on my personal consumption. CFL’s are a start but plans are in the works for additional efficiency to my home to increase energy efficiency.
On the public level, while my family life takes up most of my time, I have written, phoned and signed petitions forwarded to my congressman against new coal power plants. In Texas we forced TXU to shelve 8 of 11 plans to build new coal plants. The remaining 3 will be worked on as well in addition to the 11 that Dynegy wants to build. Couldn’t attend Wednesday’s protest but will get as involved as my personal commitments allow.
Radio-tec:
Good going. You’re doing more than I am. Its easy to express anonymous (somteimes vain) opinions here on CD, but I’m short on action. I have participated in some on-line canned petitions from PennEnvironment, and try to drive less, etc.
Kem Patrick: I’m not sure I’m a progressive. My registration card says I’m a Republican, but if the neocons are the future of the GOP, its not for me. CD has been fresh air and an education for me, and on the whole, the progressive point of view usually makes the most sense.
Issues like global warming and the Iraq invasion transcend politics. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and CD gives counterpoint to the spin and propganda on Fox and in newspaper columns, that network news and even npr ducks.
Well that’s four bloggers now, things are picking up here after all. WOW!
Yeah ~BBR~ sometimes I get discouraged by the large number of trolls here now and so many of the regulars have stopped coming here.
BBR
Methinks you have it backwards. It is the politics that trancends the issues. Not the other way around. They will get what the want by any means nessasary.
My frustrations with CD are 1) Its addictive! Some days there are too many great articles and hundreds of posts, and then one starts writing ones own posts. Then there is siouxrose. It takes such an effort to understand what she is trying to say. And the hemp posters, the 5 page manifestos, crazies, and the trolls… It soaks up so much time. 2) We take turns preaching to the CD choir on issues like this one, but it remains in our little blog.
Many of the posters are quite active with their causes and I really admire them. In a world where real media journalism is mostly limited to ‘Bill Moyers’ and ‘60 Minutes’, reading informed comment and trying to write meaningful input helps keep me sharp when the Fox News fans start on me.
BBR,
I fully agree with you that we need to not build any more coal plants (at least until the CO2 is sequestered).
The purpose of the cap and trade would be to constrain CO2 growth and, if it is painful enough, to shut down the most carbon intensive power generation (coal).
Stopping new coal is only the first step. If you don’t like cap and trade, what political mechanism would you prefer to actually reduce the CO2 emissions?
My personal preference would be a carbon tax. It is more straightforward. The utilities, the actual decision makers, know exactly what the future holds with a carbon tax. It is much more predictable and less subject to fraud and engineered loopholes than cap and trade.
Bill
I sometimes do not understand Siouxrose either, but often do. I do understnd she’s a swell person, has a high degee of common sense and is just downright nice and she knows things that I’m not fully aware of.
Do you know what Billy eats for breakfast? WOW.
Billy: I’ll check out the carbon tax when I get a chance. I have to admit my thinking isn’t clear on the subject. How quickly would a carbon tax have an effect on CO2 emissions? If the need is immediate as some people believe, then a moratorium on new coal plants would be a place to start. It would limit growth and probaly increase prices, but would encourage conservation, more efficient methods of transmission, higher efficiency appliances and more home solar power.
My preference would be to freeze coal and then replace it with generation III and IV nuclear plants, and renewables where they fit. There would have to be an urgent program to perfect methods of recycling high level nuclear waste. I understand Japan Steel is considering a second mold large enough to cast reactor vessels, and Lehigh Heavy Forge in Bethlehem PA might getting into the business. (There will be reactor vessels AND Gemesa wind turbines being built in my neighborhood.)
We need a 180 degree turn in Washington from vetoing incentives on renewables and conservation while invading Iraq and going begging to Saudi Arabia to encouraging non-GHG power and conservation. I’m hoping the next president will change the course. The “energy czar” article from a few days ago had some good ideas.
bbr,
The first impact of either cap/trade or carbon tax on CO2 emissions is to influence the decisions on electrical generation capacity expansion. The desired first effect is to inhibit new coal plants, the most carbon intensive form of generation. My guess, and that is all it is, would be that seeing a tax of $75/ton of CO2 in 10 years would be enough to stop new coal plants in their tracks.
The second desired effect from a tax would be to encourage the premature decommissioning of existing coal plants. My guess is that seeing a tax of $125/ton in 10 years would start that ball rolling.
The lead time from the start of planning to an online generation capacity ranges from about 6 years for natural gas to about 12 years for nuclear. Wind would probably be less than 6 years if there were not a queue for wind turbines. Wind generation is, by its nature, modular so that speeds up installation. (If it is for baseload, wind needs to be 100% backed up with gas with today’s technologies.)
One approach that could have a quicker impact would be a very heavily subsidized and publicized program to install domestic solar systems, both thermal and PV. In parallel with this, a similarly subsidized and publicized program to convert homes from fossil fuel heating to geoheatpumps would be helpful. These could bear fruit within a year or two.
The only other thing that could have an impact in a shorter time that 6 to 8 years would be conservation. That can have an almost immediate impact.
Being a card carrying liberal, I would take most of the revenue from a carbon tax and equally distribute it among all US citizens and legal residents; otherwise a carbon tax is very regressive.
Bill
PS I knew that Japan Steel was considering expanding but I had not heard that Lehigh Forge was looking at domestically producing reactor forgings. Has there been a press release on that?
KEM - I only eat my power breakfast when undergoing character asassination.
Could not a straightforward carbon tax (paid by all) be used to offset capital costs of increasing efficiency and the phasing in of alternative sources? I have an idea or two for capturing more wind energy (lower velocities)(with full understanding that higher velocities provide more energy, but whatever one captures is essentially free) than can be used by conventional wind turbines.
Man of LaMancha,
There are already subsidies to underwrite low CO2 technologies:
Wind, solar and the first couple of new nuclear plants receive a production tax credit. (This is not really appropriate for nuclear because, once a plant is online, it is a cash cow for the utility. But it is in the law.)
Federal loan guarantees are being set up for new nuclear construction. This will be valuable in securing commercial loans because the front end cost of a nuclear plant is so large. This is not a real out of pocket government expense unless the utility goes belly up.
IMHO, the real value of a carbon tax is not the revenue generated but the influence on generation technology decisions. Absence a tax of some sort, the government may have to operate by fiat (for example, outlawing new coal plants or renewable mandates) and the government is usually not very smart when it comes to making business decisions.
Bill
Golly Bill, I’d have to have that breakfast every day.
America has operated from a standpoint of I’ve got mine now forget I have it basis.
We are 4% of the worlds population yet consume 25% of its resources.
It is apparent economic expansion has outstripped our ecosystem. Price is not the remediation we need either.
In many cases that only hurts the poor. We need to level the playing field. Those with egregious consumption patterns need to be reined in. Only one thing will make the playing field more level where the rich have as much as the poor to work with. Rationing.
While we reinvent the clean energy wheel we ration everything that emits carbon. That includes electricity generation. We need to start where it hurts everyone equally and then work our way out of this mess. Unless and until we are willing to do so, all we are doing is the same thing the government is doing. Blowing hot air.
So it’s time. Ration gas….ration electricity….ration water…..Then and only then will the rich understand the problems. In the interim they continue to pay whatever it takes to “have” what they want. The rest of us, not so much.
And while we work on getting our own people to understand their complicity in arriving at this juncture who is going to say to the Chinese, and India and Russia well, sorry but now that we realize the problems we have created are of a planetary magnitude that we are responsible for creating and well, since you’ve been living as serfs for centuries and you see what fossil fuel can get you, somehow we are going to tell them they can’t have it.
Uh huh, sure you are.
No one gets the depth and seriousness of the problems that we are facing. A few little conservation gestures like planting a garden and riding a bike once in awhile are cute but nowhere near what will be required.
I was accused in another post of not getting the point. I was told to either “lead. follow or get out of the way” I can only respond to that in a nicer manner.
I get it. I know how serious it is. In as much as I am and have been for 56 years living a very low resource lifestyle there are billions who have not a hint what we are up against. Billions.
The same people who are building coal fired power plants on the edge of nature reserves are the enemies of our earth community not me. Reserve your energy and need to vent for them. For without their taking part in the radical immediate changes necessary we are rapidly approaching the 6th mass extinction.
Be not fooled. It has begun. Our first big red flag was a woman named Katrina and it has been 3 years hence and we are adding to the problems at the rate of 2-3% a year.
Buckle up. We are underway.
Bill: I found a little time to look at carbontax.org. It seems more reasonable than cap and trade, and might work with utilities as they have to negotiate rates with PUCs. Big Oil however, would just double the tax and pass it on to the consumer.
The tax revenues themselves could be used to encourage insulation, groundwater heat pumps, home solar, hybrid cars..
I think the energy czar / fiat approach is necessary as it is getting late in the game, but the carbon tax feeding back to promote conservation and small scale renewables should be part of the program. With a “war effort” we could possibly expedite wind energy to 20% and nuclear to 60% of electric power by 2030, even 2020.
bbr–001 Welcome to CD. It is good to know that this site is attractive to all sorts of folks–not just us aging “lefties.” As for the issue of global warming and the environment in general, I am one of those people who believes this is way more serious than any of really want to face, and that the earth is bound and determnined to prevail and will do what she needs to. We are the ones who may not survive, and as a species,frankly, we don’t deserve to. We have been committing matricide against our mother, Earth. In the words of Shakespeare, ” What fools these mortals be.”
bbr,
If a carbon tax is a staight up tax on CO2 emissions, the effect on coal users is much greater than oil or gas. Crude oil is about 6x the cost of coal and it is not as concentrated a source of CO2. Natural gas is not quite as expensive as oil but it has even lower CO2 emissions.
To have 60% of our electricity from nuclear would require about 125-150 new reactors (it would depend on the specific units used-some have more power than others). Given the current state of our manufacturing capability and capacity, it would truly take a manhattan style project to pull it off in 20 years. (This is government central planning writ large. Are you sure your Republican credentials are up to date?)
Raising our wind generating to 20% may not be wise unless the large scale energy storage problem is solved. Wind, without rapid response backup power, creates grid instability after about 6%. Denmark has that sort of wind penetration but they have on call hydroelectric from Norway and nuclear from Sweden via cable interconnects.
Bill
Of course with a massive program to develop clean energy, wind, solar, tidal, wave and geo-thermal, we would not have to rely upon wind alone. ___ Right Biil.
When our water tables continue to fall and mighty rivers convert to streams, nuclear power will have another problem to say the least.
Kem,
Of the technologies you listed, solar and wind are commercially available now. Both are intermittent sources. Intermittency is more of a problem for wind because it is also unpredicatable. Solar has not been as widely deployed because it is generally not cost competitive with wind.
Geo-thermal is very limited where it can be deployed. Other than a very few select locations, there are technology limiters. Don’t count geo-thermal out but don’t bank on it.
Tidal power is in the development stage. There are trial units in the East River in New York and in a bay in Northern Ireland. There will probably be more expansion of this technology but it is limited to very specific geography. It is, like wind and solar, intermittent.
I don’t think we will see much tidal power using dams like the Rance river facility in France because of the environmental impact. Future deployment will tap the tidal currents rather than the change in elevation.
Wave power has had reliabilty issues. Storm damage has plagued prototype deployments. Perhaps someday.
Drought and water table issues are a problem for any thermal cycle generation system with water cooling if it is in a vulnerable location. This is not just an issue for nuclear plants but also coal, gas and, potentially, thermal solar. Nuclear plants have received the most publicity on this but coal plants in the TVA system have had the same problem.
Nuclear plants do use more cooling water per kilowatthour than coal because the peak coolant temperature is not as high in a nuclear plant. This makes a nuclear plant less thermodymanically efficient than coal or gas.
Bill
I didn’t think it would be quite that many reactors, more like 100. Is that 65-75 twin reactor stations, or 125 plus? Either way, that’s a lot of red tape. Even the 25-30 now in various stages of permitting won’t be on line until at least 2020, and that isn’t much above the replacement rate for older units to be decommisoned.
I haven’t been much of a Republican for some time, and I don’t consider this weird radical coalition now running the White House to be Republicans, either. The party has been hijacked.
We are facing a global climate emergency and a national energy independence emergency at the same time. It seems some sort of above politics “war like” effort is required. (Other than colonizing Iraq or annexing Canada.)
I don’t know if they use it any more, but Philly Electric has a reservoir they would fill during off peak hours and then drain it through turbines when demand was getting close to capacity. Maybe that would work with wind farms.
Just read the Sunday paper. A local official in Schuylkill County wanted to replace coal with natrual gas in a couple public buildings to save money on heating. Boy did he get jumped on! That’s anthracite country.
bbr
My number was just a back of the envelope. I was thinking of individual reactors, not stations with multiple reactors.
I don’t think we will see many more of the existing nuclear fleet decomissioned in the next 30 years or so. The nuclear owners and NRC are beginning to look beyond the extensions to 60 years that are now being granted to feasibility of 80 year life spans.
Pumped storage will work with an intermittent source but the environmental impact of pumped storage is probably going to limit further expansion of that technology.
Going from coal to gas to save money? Good luck unless the coal plant is really old and inefficient. Doing it for local pollution or GHG makes sense but to save money? On second thought, if the coal plant is more labor intensive, it might be possible.
Regards,
Bill
I don’t believe too many actuallly care what you, BBR, or I and the others here think about the issue Billy.
Kem,
Old links never die. They just fall off the bottom of the page.
Farewell good friend until we meet again on another link.
Regards,
Bill
KEM, You are absolutely correct about the lack of response to such an important subject, but it’s kind of like the old saying about the weather, “Everybody complains about it, but nobody ever does anything”. Everyone seems to want to take a ‘wait and see’ attitude, but on an issue of such global significance it could be a death knell for us all. We MUST solve this problem, and should keep in mind quality of ideas trumps quantity, and historically one person with a great idea CAN change the world. Unfortunately, the one person we have had for the past 8 years, with the power to change the world, is misguided, a fossil fuel fossil, a dunce by any measure, and very likely a psychopath.
Good posts, everyone. Billy, while you understand my position about the need to not build any more nuclear, direct massive resources toward alternatives, and decommission existing nuclear ASAP, we are in complete agreement about coal fired plants. A carbon tax is the logical solution to holding corporations responsible for damage caused, the correct thing to do, but unfortunately a pretty hard sell to interests on the right of the political spectrum. The debate has really little to do with WHAT needs to be done, but HOW to clear special corporate interests off the playing field so the teams favored by most Americans can take control the game.
I do have one question you might be able to help with, Billy. I think I told you during the course of my research I found a map of the US that showed geothermal resources in all 50 states sufficient to provide at a minimum home heating for every place in this country. I think we both agree this is doable, practical, and necessary, and you even alluded to it in a post above. You seem to state, likely very correctly, there are limited areas with sufficient geothermal resources to provide baseload electrical power generation, but they DO exist, and according to the map I found in more locations than most people even realize. The main problem seems to be transmission of the electricity over distances.
To my surprise, in another article I discovered, the loss amounts to less than 5%, but of what consequence is this if the power is virtually completely ‘green’, cheap, and renewable? Do you have some further articles I might look at about power transmission loss ove distance? Paul.Magill@Rockitz.net
BTW, does anyone know what happened to the C02 article that was at the top of the CD page a few days ago? It seems to have been ‘disappeared’.
Paul,
Ground source heatpumps are useable almost everywhere in the US and are almost always to be preferred for residential heating and cooling to fossil fuel. Unfortunately, they also tend to be pricey. I replaced a worn out oil furnace a few years ago and chickened out when I got the estimate for $8,000 for the ground loop installation. I ended up going with a conventional heat pump and have regretted it since.
I had a great link for geo-thermal powerplant information. It was a powerpoint presentation about 200 slides long. I will see if I can find it again.
I will see what I can find on long distance power transmission losses. Nothing comes immediately to mind except I think 5% loss for a long distance line is probably low.
Rick Boucher from SW Virginia is the go to guy for writing cap and trade and/or carbon tax in the House of Representatives. He is the chair of the subcomittee. He is from Wise county which is coal country and it is somewhat like putting the fox in charge of the hen house. I have written him with my thoughts on carbon tax and received no reply (I’m not in his district so I would really expect one).
I am not sure that a poor tax or weak cap and trade is better than nothing. Right now most of the utilities are running scared of high carbon fees and are acting accordingly.
Bill