One of the favorite tropes of my
Republican colleagues in the Montana legislature is that the Obama
administration, working through the nefarious EPA, is waging a “War on Coal.” Dealing with this rhetoric, which I have
done in previous posts, is getting a little tedious, but Sen. Fred Thomas’ most
recent broadside in this so-called war is so absurdly ill-founded that it
really requires a response.
In a recent column
in the Missoulian, Thomas goes after the EPA’s carbon emission standards for
new coal fired power plants. Among other things, he claims that the EPA, evidently
in cahoots with unnamed environmental groups, has imposed these standards to “end
coal development.” The result, he claims, will be that no new coal fired power
plants will be built, resulting in the loss of “hundreds of thousands of jobs
supported by the American coal industry.” The price Americans pay for
electricity will go through the roof. The diversity of our energy supply
portfolio will decline. And there will be an “immediate cessation” in the
development of new carbon emission technology by an industry that has achieved “dramatic
reductions” in pollution without goading from the EPA
It’s hard to know where to begin with
this muddle, but let’s give it a try.
As has been noted over and over
again, and despite what Thomas thinks, the EPA’s new source carbon standards
are not going to block the construction of new coal fired power plants, for one
simple reason: even without the standards, nobody is planning to build such
plants anyway. Look at the figure below, which is taken from a US Energy Information
Administration forecast
of where new generating capacity is going to come from for the next 25 years.
The little black bars, which can hardly claw their way above the horizontal axis,
represent coal’s contribution to that new capacity. Over the whole period, coal accounts for only
three percent of the total, leaving almost all of new electrical generating
capacity to come from natural gas and renewables.
Since the EPA standards can’t
stop new coal fired power plants from being built if they weren’t going to be
built in the first place, the obvious corollary is that the standards are not
going to destroy “hundreds of thousands” of coal supported jobs. Of course even
if the standards were to prevent new plants from being developed, the effect
would simply be to slow the growth of coal supported jobs, not to destroy the
jobs that are already in place. So even in the worst case, “hundreds of
thousands” of coal supported jobs have never been in jeopardy from the EPA
regulations, and Thomas should know that.
The same thing goes for the trajectory
of electricity prices. How these prices behave in the future is going to depend
on how fast the supply of energy grows relative to the growth of demand. Look
at the figure again. Coal is not expected to contribute in any significant way
to new generating capacity, and that means the EPA standards will have nothing
to do with how fast supply is going to grow. The standards therefore cannot produce
the electricity price spikes that Thomas wants you to be alarmed by, nor can
they hasten the decline in coal’s market share (not that that means what the
senator thinks it does*).
Thomas is right about one thing:
there is a war going on here. But it’s a war on climate change, not coal, and
frankly, it’s off to a pretty lame start. The EPA new source standards aren’t
going to deflect emissions from whatever rising path they are on, let alone
reduce them. But make no mistake about it: if the war on climate change ever
gets serious, carbon emissions are going to have to go down (slowing emissions growth will not be enough) and that means that short of a technological miracle we are going to have to reduce the amount of coal we dig up and
burn. That’s a tough fact for Montana politicians to swallow, but let’s face
it: we can talk all we want about “responsible resource development” or how “coal
is always going to be a part of our energy future” or “hundreds of thousands of
coal jobs,” but if we are serious about arresting climate change, we can't have it both ways. We're going to have to fish or cut bait.
None of this means we should shut down coal, declare victory and go home. It can't be done and it won't work. And largely empty gestures like
the EPA new source standards are not going to get us where we want to be. The
efficient path to reducing emissions is going to involve a lot more than that:
more renewables, less oil as well as less coal, more energy conservation and
efficiency and possibly carbon sequestration. What we should dread is that we will never start down than path in the
first place. Or that when we do, it will already be too late.
* Thomas believes that when coal’s market share declines we
lose diversity in the energy supply portfolio. How does that work? Coal is by
far the largest single source of energy in the electricity supply portfolio. As
it is displaced by other energy sources such as wind or natural gas, it loses
market share, we become less dependent on a single source for our energy, and we
have a broader set of alternative sources to choose from. That amounts to greater diversity, not less.
