A recent story by Bloomberg’s Jennifer Dloughy spotlights the struggle between coal and the utilities at EPA on the upcoming redo of the MATS rule. We correct and comment on the article as needed. It’s time for the coal industry to pay attention so the utilities don’t get the best of it again.
The story is below. Our comments are in [bold brackets].
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(Bloomberg) — The Trump administration is poised to propose maintaining Obama-era restrictions on mercury pollution from power plants, responding to opposition from electric utilities that have already spent billions of dollars to meet the requirements. [Some in the utility industry don’t want to bring coal back or want to defend fuel switching. So they have apparently successfully lobbied the Trump EPA to maintain the scientifically insupportable mercury emissions limits promulgated by the Obama EPA. The expensive emissions upgrades required by the MATS rule allows the utilities to skew the economic justification toward shuttering coal plants.]
At the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency is set to propose changes that may make it harder to toughen mercury emissions standards in the future by disavowing the legal justification for the regulation and altering the way its health benefits are measured.
The proposal reflects a balancing act for the Trump administration, which has struggled to address a rule loathed by coal producers, viewed warily by EPA officials who object to how it was justified and yet has already been complied with by power companies. [The utilities swallowed the MATs rule without a fight. Now they want consumers and taxpayers to pay for their mistake via higher rates.]
“We’ve been in compliance for a number of years now, the equipment is operating and it is effective. We really see no reason at all to roll back the requirements,” said John McManus, senior vice president of environmental services at American Electric Power Company Inc. “Retired plants aren’t coming back, and we see no reason to turn back the controls that are running on our existing plants.” [Translation: This comment is basically the same as the one made by Obama EPA chief Gina McCarthy who laughed off the SCOTUS ruling against MATS — i.e., “Who cares? The desired damage to the coal industry has been done.”
The 2012 rule prompted a wave of coal-fired power plant closures and drew the ire of a powerful foe: coal magnate Robert E. Murray, who has spent years crusading against the regulation in court. His coal company, Murray Energy Corp., argues its domestic sales have suffered as a result of the standards. [We were there in the heat of the battle with EPA. MATS was never effectively fought by the coal industry. It’s a great case study of the downside of relying on ineffective, swampy, science-illiterate lawyers and lobbyists on junk science-driven issues.]
But power companies such as Duke Energy Corp. have implored the EPA and White House to leave the mercury standards intact. Utilities have already spent some $18 billion installing required technology to fulfill the requirements and satisfy April 2015 compliance deadlines that have long since passed, industry trade groups told the EPA this summer. [That’s $18 billion to be paid over time by ratepayers and taxpayers — not utilities.]
For instance, AEP has invested nearly $8.8 billion on environmental equipment retrofits at its coal-fired power plants since 2000, with much of that equipment contributing to its compliance with the mercury rule. The utility-owner has retired 7,200 megawatts of coal-fired generation from 2011 through 2016 as part of its effort to meet the more stringent mercury rules. Mercury emissions from its plants have dropped 95 percent since 2001. [Though at great expense, none of these retrofits has improved public health or the environment one iota.]
Coal-fired power plants are the largest U.S. source of mercury, a metal that is converted in soil and water into a neurotoxin that can lower IQ, cause motor function deficits, damage the nervous system and lead to more heart attacks. [Uh… as physicist Willie Soon and BURN MORE COAL’s Steve Milloy pointed out in 2012 amid the Obama EPA rush to issue MATS, ” Of the estimated 12,000-plus tons of mercury emitted into the air annually (mostly from volcanic activity, forest fires and effusions from ocean and soils), only about 45 tons (less than 0.5 percent) comes from U.S. power plants – and is largely undetectable when compared to the naturally occurring background levels in our land and oceans.” Most of the mercury in US air today, especially in the West, wafts over the Pacific from China.]
“More mercury in the air means more mercury in the water, which means more mercury in the fish, which means more mercury in people who eat the fish,” said Janet McCabe, an acting assistant administrator of the EPA’s air office in the Obama administration. “That is especially problematic for young children, pregnant women and the babies they are carrying.” [More nonsense about mercury. Typical exposures to mercury in the environment are harmless. The first principle of toxicology is, “the dose makes the poison.” Typical exposures to mercury in the environment are not high enough to cause health effects by any stretch of the imagination. Check out this 2003 FOXNews.com essay from Milloy on coal plant emissions and mercury toxicity. Fifteen years later, the facts remain the same.]
The EPA is set to propose keeping the mercury limits in place while simultaneously withdrawing an assertion the requirements are “appropriate and necessary” — a legal benchmark under the Clean Air Act.
The change would arm the rule’s opponents with ammunition for another lawsuit challenging the mercury standards in an effort to win a court-ordered repeal. It’s not clear any such litigation would prevail; a 2008 ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on another mercury rule sets a high bar. [The MATS rule should be repealed. Half measures send mixed/erroneous messages that federal judges aren’t inclined to decipher in the correct way.]
Although the EPA is ensnared by the partial government shutdown, it has enough leftover funding to continue operating, at least this week. The agency is expected to issue the proposal as soon as Wednesday.
The EPA also is set to recalculate the cost and benefits of the mercury rule in a way that dramatically shrinks its estimated potential health gains — a change that could prevent the EPA from making the mercury pollution requirements more stringent in the future. [Excellent. This is the issue of co-benefits. The Trump EPA is getting rid of the practice of including co-benefits in cost-benefit analysis. Here’s how it worked in MATS. The estimated annual direct benefits of regulating mercury were paltry (on the order of $6 million) vs. costs of implementation (on the order of $10 billion). To overcome this disparity, the Obama EPA included in the MATS cost-benefit analyses the economic value of the alleged lives saved by reductions in PM2.5 emissions from power plants, as fewer mercury emissions necessarily meant fewer PM2.5 emissions — a BS number that amount to some $90 billion. Read Milloy’s Amazon.com best seller “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA” for more details. Not only does PM2.5 not kill anyone but there PM2.5 already has a separate regulatory program. So justifying MATS on the back of PM2.5 was just a way the Obama EPA could dodge the rules to screw the coal industry.]
At issue are the broad health benefits that spring from regulations — not just those that directly flow from reducing a pollutant explicitly targeted by individual rules. In the case of the mercury rule, for example, the technology utilities employed to curtail mercury emissions also pared the amount of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide belched out of their power plants, which the EPA said would reduce asthma attacks, heart attacks and premature deaths. [Read “Scare Pollution.” These health effects claims are all nonsense.]
Those “co-benefits” of the mercury rule were an essential figure in the Obama administration’s calculation of the its ultimate price tag. Although the EPA estimated it would cost industry $9.6 billion annually to install necessary technology, it said health benefits from reducing mercury and other non-targeted pollutants were worth nearly 10 times more. [Like we said.]
As much as 89 percent of the 2012 rule’s health benefits came from reducing fine particulate matter — beyond the toxic air pollutants the measure actually targeted, according to the EPA.
Now, under President Donald Trump, the EPA is set to assert that because it is leaning on its Clean Air Act authority to regulate hazardous air pollutants, it is improper to consider the health benefits of paring other pollution.
The EPA may argue that pollutants regulated under other programs can’t be used to “justify a regulation that is only supposed to be about hazardous air pollutants,” said Jeff Holmstead, an assistant EPA administrator under former President George W. Bush.
By disregarding co-benefits, the new proposal is set to conclude that the rule’s costs exceed its benefits. Environmentalists say the change could preclude the agency from counting these benefits to justify the cost of toughening requirements in the future. [MATS is a high-cost, no benefit rule.]
The Trump administration approach would limit “the EPA’s ability to recognize the full range of benefits that result from pollution control,” said Joe Goffman, a former senior counsel in agency’s air office. The result is “to limit the reach of the Clean Air Act as a tool for regulating air pollution and protecting public health.” [US air is clean and safe. No further regulation is needed.]
The mercury standards have been the subject of litigation for years. After they were imposed in 2012, the coal industry sued, ultimately forcing the EPA to revisit its conclusions. The Obama administration reinstated the regulation in 2016 and Murray Energy sued to block it, but a federal appeals court delayed the case so the Trump administration could reconsider the rule. [All the harm caused by the MATS rule was avoidable. But the coal industry has been asleep about the PM2.5 issue for 20 years. Thanks to Milloy’s work on PM2.5 and service on the Trump EPA transition team, that is no longer the case.]