Category — Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

“The third part of my plan is to reform the bureaucracy, in particular the EPA, so that it focuses on regional and cross-state issues, providing scientific research, as well as environmental analysis and cost-comparison studies to support state environmental organizations. We will return greater regulatory authority to the states to manage air and water quality rather than imposing one-size-fits-all federal rules.”

- Gov. Rick Perry,  Energizing American Jobs and Security, October 14, 2011.

Part I yesterday described Governor Rick Perry’s call for greater oil and gas resource access to government land to help create economic and job growth–and open-ended opportunity given technological developments.

Indeed, ‘peak oil’ and ‘peak gas’ concerns have been waylaid by reality. At a recent conference of the U.S. Association for Energy Economics in Washington, D.C., it was clear that energy economists believe that demand for petroleum will not fall around the globe for many years, decades, and possibly centuries to come.

Therefore, if we do not produce it here, production will occur by countries, such as China and Venezuela, that do not currently have the resources we do to efficiently drill for oil and take care of our beautiful planet. Moreover, many of these countries are not friendly to us and will use the funds in a way that may not be helpful for future peace and prosperity.

EPA’s Ram: The ‘Precautionary Principle’

Governor Perry is correct that individual states are better prepared to decide on public policy initiatives that reflect the needs of their citizens. Allowing for a competitive environment between states will bring about innovation and quality energy production that is beneficial to the states and the nation.

Regulations put in place by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are based on the precautionary principle, which is defined at dictionary.com as follows:

In environmental matters, the theory that if the effects of a product or actions are unknown, then the product should not be used or the action should not be taken.

This better-safe-than-sorry principle, however, does not take into account the real costs, which include opportunity costs, to the economy and society. Therefore, making policy based on the precautionary principle is misguided and could do more harm than good in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and providing healthier outcomes for citizens. [Read more →]

[Ed. Note: Also see Mr. Vaughn's previous post: The U.S. EPA’s Regulatory Clean Air Benefit-Cost Estimates (30 free lunches for the price of 1?)]

President Obama’s deferment of the EPA’s latest ozone standards puts on hold annual compliance costs that the Agency estimated at $90 billion by 2020. The Wall Street Journal termed the $90 billion figure an “undoubtedly lowball estimate.” [1]

Undoubtedly, to be sure (more on that in a moment). Even so, it’s news when the EPA ‘fesses up to costs as serious as $90 billion, instead of estimating chump change, such as the $0.8 billion a year estimated for the proposed “Clean Air Transport Rule” (CATR) aimed at utilities.

Getting Into the Numbers

The $0.8 billion estimate has flown under the media’s radar but—in its own way—merits more media attention than the $90 ozone number. That’s because the $0.8 billion plays the role of denominator in the EPA’s nuttiest claim of all time: a benefit-cost ratio of 350-to-1 for a proposed regulation written under the Clean Air Act (CAA). Playing the role of numerator in that ratio are $280 billion of annual (mostly human health) benefits. [2]

Heretofore, the EPA’s benefit-cost ratios for its CAA regulation were only about one-tenth as grandiose—in the vicinity of 35-to-1. [3] Even 35-to-1 is mind-boggling enough but 350-to-1? That’s the equivalent of a private-sector CEO claiming that the company’s latest “must-have” gizmo will attract 350 willingly-paid dollars out of customers’ wallets for every dollar’s worth of resources consumed in the process—or $349 of pure profit out of every $350 of revenue. Wall Street would dismiss that CEO as obviously delusional.

The EPA, however, caters not to Wall Street cynics but to audiences wanting to believe that yet another CAA regulation will crank out phenomenal benefits at almost no cost. So, in that respect, the 350-to-1 claim is just more of the same from the EPA. But, the ratio is so obviously way-over-the-top that it signals something way out of the ordinary: a jihad against the regulated power industry. [Read more →]

On August 8, 2011, EPA published the Cross State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) in response to the court decision, North Carolina v. EPA, 531 F.3d 896 (D.C. Cir. 2008), which vacated the Clean Air Interstate Rule. But instead of building on the lessons learned of successful programs, the rule makes so many changes to the cap-and-trade provisions that pollution reduction is in real doubt. Moreover the changes are so extensive that reliability impacts are possible.

CSAPR Rule

The rule requires 23 states to reduce annual SO2 and NOx emissions to help downwind areas attain particulate matter and ozone ambient air quality standards. This rule replaces EPA’s 2005 Clean Air Interstate Rule with three different cap programs.

A 2012 annual SO2 cap is set at 3,385,929 tons as compared to the recent (average 2008 to 2010) emissions of 5,216,931 tons. There is a 2012 annual NOx cap set at 1,245,869 tons compared to the recent emissions of 1,595,756 tons.

Finally, EPA established a 2012 Ozone Season NOx cap 495,314 tons compared to recent emissions of 566,363 tons. In all three programs there is another round of reductions in 2014.

Cap-and-Trade Problems

According to EPA, Cap and Trade is a market-based policy tool for protecting human health and the environment. A cap-and-trade program first sets an aggressive cap, or maximum limit, on emissions. Sources covered by the program then receive authorizations to emit in the form of emissions allowances, with the total amount of allowances limited by the cap. Each source can design its own compliance strategy to meet the overall reduction requirement, including sale or purchase of allowances, installation of pollution controls, implementation of efficiency measures, among other options.

Individual control requirements are not specified under a cap-and-trade program, but each emissions source must surrender allowances equal to its actual emissions in order to comply. Sources must also completely and accurately measure and report all emissions in a timely manner to guarantee that the overall cap is achieved.

Unfortunately, there are significant problems with CSAPR cap and trade. [Read more →]

Last August, the the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) graded itself on its enforcement of the Clean Air Act (CAA) in terms of economic benefit-cost analysis. Surprise not: EPA came up with an astounding $31 of clean air benefits for every dollar of cost. That, and Administrator Lisa Jackson can leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Deja Vu: EPA’s 1997 Study

Back in 1997, the EPA credited itself with providing $22.2 trillion in benefits at a cost of a half trillion dollars from enforcing the CAA from 1970 (when the EPA was established) through 1990 (when Congress amended the CAA in stricter form)—a B/C ratio of more than 40-to-1.

Of the EPA’s $22 trillion net benefit estimate (gross benefits less cost), economists Randall Lutter and Richard B. Belzer wrote: “We know of no professional economist independent of EPA who takes the EPA’s estimate seriously,” for—if actually true—the sum would equal “roughly the aggregate net worth of all U.S. households.”

Lutter and Belzer scoffed convincingly but not enough to change the EPA’s penchant for grandiosity. Hence, more yardsticks are needed to measure the absurdity of the EPA’s cost-benefit estimates, at both the “macro” and “micro” levels. Such a stock-taking points toward a do-over on the costs and benefits of clean air regulation by EPA.

Macro Level Issues

Regarding the 1997 study, Lutter and Belzer compare EPA’s finding to other major statistics for the entire economy. Here are some more “macro” yardsticks to measure the EPA’s astounding B/C claims:

Comparison to U.S. Defense Spending. The EPA’s August 2010 study’s estimate of the annual clean air benefits amount to nearly twice U.S. defense spending, including operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Plausible?

Comparison to GDP. Incredibly, the EPA’s total net benefit estimate is far higher still. The EPA subdivides the clean air benefits into: (A) the benefits attributable to the amended CAA (as already noted, nearly twice annual defense spending); plus (B) the benefits attributable to the CAA of 1970 – 1990, the legislative foundation on which the amended CAA rests. Including the benefits from Part B would push the grand total to as much as 60% or 70% of annual U.S. GDP—a result so obviously absurd that EPA’s August 2010 study obscures it with a schematic diagram. [Read more →]

Presidential candidate Barack Obama promised that his policies would cause electricity rates to “skyrocket” and “bankrupt” any company trying to build a coal-fired generating plant. This is one promise he and his über-regulators are keeping.

President Obama energetically promotes wind and solar projects that require millions of acres of land and billions of dollars in subsidies to generate expensive, intermittent electricity and create (really centrally plan) jobs that cost taxpayers upwards of $220,000 apiece – most of them in China.

His Interior Department is locking up more coal and petroleum prospects, via “wild lands” and other designations, and dragging its feet on issuing leases and drilling permits.

Meanwhile, his Environmental Protection Agency is challenging shale gas drilling and fracking, and imposing draconian carbon dioxide (CO2) emission rules, now that Congress and voters have rejected cap-tax-and-trade.

Across agencies, the war is on against the dense, reliable energies that were part of the Industrial Revolution (see the posts on W. S. Jevons for more) and are behind modern society today.

The beat-down of carbon-based energy goes on. Oil, gas and coal provide approximantely 84% of the energy that keeps America humming, but the administration is doing all it can to reduce each and all. American voters, consumers and workers may want more drilling, mining and use of hydrocarbons, to get the economy going again. But the administration has a different agenda.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has unveiled another 946 pages of regulations that she claims will protect public health. The regs cover 84 “dangerous pollutants” that are already being scrubbed out of power plant emission streams by a host of innovative technologies. In fact, coal-fired generators now emit a fraction of what they did just 40 years ago.

The most frequently cited of these pollutants is mercury. Higher doses cause well-known ill-health effects, from severe neurological damage to brain damage and death. However, it has been all but eliminated in herbicides, light switches, thermometers and other products.

Its presence in coal and power plant emissions is likewise minimal and declining. [Read more →]

[Editor note: This new white paper by the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council (ERCC) is summarized by director Scott Segal (full bio below). ERCC is a coalition of power companies that works with labor unions, consumers, and manufacturing and service businesses on clean air issues.]

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has now signed a proposal to advance a new maximum achievable control technology (MACT) standard for the electric utility industry, known as the Utility MACT.

Back in 1998, the EPA made a finding regarding the need to regulate mercury emissions from power plants. At the time, EPA made clear that there were no incremental benefits associated with addressing any other hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) from the power sector other than mercury. Specifically, no health benefits were found from addressing non-mercury HAPs such as acid gases.

Such controls are extraordinarily costly with profound impacts on electricity supply and price, and job creation. In the intervening years, no additional data has been added to the Agency record that asserts any specific benefits to regulating for non-mercury HAPs. And yet, in the proposal issuing from EPA, the Agency seeks to regulate these non-mercury HAPs at great expense for no incremental benefit.

A Wave of Regulations

EPA admits the pending proposal will cost at least $10 billion, making it one of the most expensive rules in the history of the Agency. And this cost does not include indirect costs nor does the Agency attempt to estimate the total cost associated with overlapping rules due to be adopted at or around the same time. Even focusing primarily on Utility MACT itself, other credible analyses have found direct cost estimates literally an order of magnitude higher than EPA, at or near $100 billion. These other analyses make more realistic assumptions about technologies likely to be required to meet the terms of proposed rule. [Read more →]

As more state and other interested parties line-up to contest the EPA’s Endangerment Finding, the EPA is becoming creative in trying to come up with other strategies to justify restricting carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gas) emissions.

One new strategy is to use the Clean Water Act to justify curbing CO2 emissions because they lead to ocean acidification (an impact which itself seems to be overblown). Another is to explore seeking greenhouse gas emissions controls at a local level, under the guise that concentrated local CO2 emissions (i.e. in cities) change the local environment in such a way as to elevate human mortality there.

Never mind that such an impact will never be detectable.

My colleague Pat Michaels refers to this as the EPA’s “whack-a-mole” strategy—while effort is concentrated on trying to beat down one of its pesky and ill-founded CO2-regulating proposals, the EPA pops up another and another and another. The EPA hopes that after a while, one mole sneaks through unnoticed and manages to grab the prized (CO2-enriched) carrot.

Currently most of the whacking is aimed at trying to halt EPA’s use of the Clean Air Act as a mechanism for sweeping CO2 regulation. The ocean acidification issue is just starting to get some attention. We have briefly touched on ocean acidification here at MasterResource, and found it to be an issue in which it seems that the more that is known the less of a problem it appears to be (i.e. the real world is a pretty adaptable and responsive place). Hopefully, the EPA’s recently announced solicitation of public comment “on what considerations EPA should take into account when deciding how to address listing of waters as threatened or impaired for ocean acidification” will garner some deserved response before the May 21, 2010 deadline.

In this post, I want to take a look at a novel mole that needs attention: the idea that local CO2 produces any sort of impact on local mortality that could be detectably reduced by local CO2 restrictions.

Background

In taking questions from the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee last year, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson insisted that that EPA needed to retain certain performance based standards setting for new and existing power plants in order to address local pollution. Senator Arlen Specter was amazed, saying there is no localized impact from CO2.

But apparently Jackson knew something that Senator Specter didn’t—the EPA was funding a study that was to conclude that, indeed, local CO2 emissions do raise local mortality in the U.S.—by three one-hundredths of one percent—or by about 792 deaths out of 2,700,000 deaths annually (from these numbers it would seem that Senator Specter wasn’t that far off). [Read more →]

Synopsis: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, by pulling its punches in the Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court case, granting California a waiver to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles, and declaring greenhouse gas emissions a danger to public health and welfare, has positioned itself to regulate fuel economy, set climate and energy policy for the nation, and amend the Clean Air Act – powers never delegated to EPA by Congress. It is time to rein in this rogue agency. The Congressional Review Act Resolution of Disapproval introduced by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) is the way to do it.

When did Congress tell the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to license California and other states to adopt non-federal fuel economy standards within their borders? When did Congress tell EPA to act as co-equal or even senior partner with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in setting fuel-economy standards for the auto industry?

When did Congress tell EPA to establish climate and energy policy for the nation? And when did Congress tell EPA to “tailor,” that is amend, the Clean Air Act to avoid an administrative debacle of its own making?

The answer, of course, is never, never, never, and never. EPA is flouting federal law and the Constitution. 

Murkowski Resolution: Averting the Regulatory Avalanche

Congress may soon get its first real opportunity to rein in this rogue agency. Sometime between now and May 25th the Senate is expected to vote on Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s Congressional Review Act (CRA) Resolution of Disapproval. This measure would veto the legal force and effect of EPA’s endangerment finding – the agency’s official determination that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions endanger public health and welfare. If allowed to stand, the endangerment finding will trigger a regulatory cascade through multiple provisions of the Clean Air Act.  As explained in previous posts (here, here, and here), America could end up with a regulatory regime far more costly than any climate bill Congress has either rejected or failed to pass, yet without the people’s elected representatives ever voting on it.

By EPA’s own admission, the endangerment finding leads to “absurd results” — administrative burdens that undermine environmental protection, economic growth, and congressional intent. [Read more →]

As a person who likes to stay abreast of our ever-expanding government in my areas of specialization (energy and environment), I periodically survey the website of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to see what they are funding with my taxpayer dollars.

Imagine my surprise when I encountered a novel Request for Proposals at their National Center for Environmental Research seeking to recruit people at non-profit institutions to dredge through EPA’s databases in order to gin up new new things for the agency to worry about and possibly regulate.

Specifically,

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as part of its Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program, is seeking applications proposing to use existing datasets from health studies to analyze health outcomes for which the link to air pollution is not well established, or to evaluate underlying heterogeneity in health responses among subgroups defined by susceptibility or extent and/or composition of exposure.

And, ever helpful, EPA gives some examples of what such data-dredging exercises might look like: [Read more →]

[Editor note: For more background and the likely consequences of EPA's endangerment finding, see Marlo Lewis, "CO₂ Regulation under the Clean Air Act: Economic Train Wreck, Constitutional Crisis, Legislative Thuggery"]

In their recent draft of an endangerment-finding technical support document (TSD), scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conclude that carbon dioxide emissions are a public health hazard and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Federal law requires that regulations be based on scientific information that is “accurate, clear, complete, and unbiased”; the most recent available; and collected by the “best available methods.” The EPA’s TSD on carbon emissions violates all of these requirements.

Staff researcher Dr. Alan Carlin, given just a few days to review the draft TSD, took EPA to the woodshed because the report offered little more than a bibliography of out-of-date reports and research rather than a rigorous scientific inquiry into the subject. The Carlin report’s preface clearly shows that the EPA abdicated its position of scientific authority on the subject: “Our conclusions do represent the best science in the sense of most closely corresponding to available observations that we currently know of [and] are sufficiently at variance with those of the IPCC, CCSP, and the Draft TSD that we believe they support our increasing concern that EPA has not critically reviewed the finding by these other groups.”

Both of EPA’s recent attempts to regulate additional pollutants under the Clean Air Act have had poor results. [Read more →]