Clean Air Act

After a year of hope, 2010 is starting out with proponents of action on climate change facing an uphill battle.

In 2009, a new president moved into the White House, Congress inched toward passing a bill to cap U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and the Copenhagen climate summit waited as a hopeful coda to a year of climate action. It ended up being a year of mixed results, however, and the prospects for climate action this year appear equally mixed.

Congress gets back into full swing next week, and several senators have made assurances that climate change will be one of the first issues they discuss.

For Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), that means a new attempt to block greenhouse gas regulation by the EPA.

A new burst of coal-fired power plant construction now underway – the largest in decades – will put 43 new coal plants on American soil in the next five years, and all of them will escape the performance standards written into the climate bill now moving through Congress.

The 43 plants are either already under construction, near construction or permitted. They fall under a designation called “progressing projects” in a report (attached below) published by the National Energy Technology Laboratory, and under provisions in the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) bill now awaiting Senate action, they would all be grandfathered in without direct restriction on their CO2 emissions.

“I’d definitely call it a bubble,” said Erik Shuster, the author of the report, who works in NETL’s Office of Systems Analysis and Planning.

Between 2000 and 2008, less than 5,600 MW of new coal-fired electric generation capacity came online, according to Shuster’s analysis. The 43 progressing plants are projected to add four times that generating capacity – 22,236 MW – in the coming five years. Collectively, they will produce more than 150 million tons of new CO2 emissions every year for many decades.

The ACES bill contains tough performance standards that would essentially require new coal plants to capture and store at least 50 percent of their CO2 emissions no later than 2025, but these 43 progressing projects – and potentially others – would escape those standards, thanks to a change in a single word in the legislation now more than 1,600 pages long.

On Dec. 18, the world’s best hope for an ambitious global agreement that can successfully rein in greenhouse gas emissions will either succeed or fizzle in Copenhagen. Much of the outcome will depend on what President Obama and his administration do in the 320 days between now and then.

In an article posted today at Yale Environment 360, Michael Northrop, director of sustainable development grantmaking at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and SolveClimate founder David Sassoon spell out the steps that Obama must take now and why 2009 is the do-or-die year for comprehensive federal climate action.

The president’s mission will fail unless he carries with him a year’s worth of demonstrated results to lend weight and credibility to the promise he made in his inaugural address to “roll back the specter of a warming planet.” In Copenhagen, his inspiring oratory alone will not be sufficient; he must demonstrate how science has been restored “to its rightful place” in America in strong climate regulation and law.

The economic stimulus package is a start, with its commitment to green jobs, clean energy, and energy efficiency, but it is only a start. The EPA must put the Clean Air Act to use in fighting any further spread of greenhouse-gas pumping coal plants. Perhaps most important, the United States needs a science-based energy and climate plan that sets a price on carbon emissions.