Sen.
Roger Webb popped up in the Missoulian
this week, trotting out the usual litany of Republican shibboleths about the
EPA’s Clean Power Plan. He says the plan, which will reduce carbon emissions
from electrical generation by about 15 percent between now and 2030, is going
to cost us an arm and a leg.* It’s going to devastate Montana’s economy. It’s going
to drive the price of electricity through the roof. It’s going to have no significant effect on
emissions. It’s…well, you know the drill. And as you also know if you’ve read my
previous posts responding to Steve
Daines, Rick
Hill, Glenn
Opel, Arnold
Olsen and Keith Regier, and Bob
Lake on this point, there’s not much new here, and it’s probably not worth plowing old
ground to show, once again, how wrong headed it all is.
But Webb, who is in line to chair the Montana Senate Energy Committee, does say
something that sticks out like a sore thumb. It's this: “Climate change
is certainly a problem that we must tackle, but the solution to this problem
must be at a cost we can afford… Republicans would prefer to...solve climate
change… by focusing on making coal-fired electricity generation even cleaner
than it is today”.
For
most of us, the idea that “climate change is certainly a problem we must tackle”
is hardly a revelation, but for a Montana Republican to acknowledge that fact
is almost unheard of. Webb says
something here that Daines and Hill and all those other guys just haven’t been
able to bring themselves to say. As far as I can see, that’s progress.
But
let’s take it up a notch.
If Webb is really serious about wanting cost effective
measures to arrest climate change, he should stop attacking the Clean Power
Plan and get down to business. Because the plan itself is designed to allow
states to figure out how they want to reduce emissions. It doesn’t mandate solar,
or wind, or end-use efficiency, or clean coal technology, or nuclear. It says
that states can meet emissions reductions targets however they want, using any
mix of strategies they chose, working in compacts with other states if that’s
to their advantage, and employing cap and trade systems or carbon taxes if they
think that will work.
In short, the plan gives states the flexibility to identify
and implement the least costly strategy for reducing emissions, and that is
what Webb says he wants. If Republicans really believe that the cheapest way to
reduce emissions is to make “coal fired electricity generation even cleaner
than it is today,” here’s their chance to prove it.
It’s not going to be easy: earlier this year Count on Coal
Montana was telling us that carbon
capture and storage at power plants is going to be very, very expensive.
Now, apparently, it’s the source of our salvation. I guess we’ll just have to
see. But whatever they do, Republicans should just bring it. They should stop
this incessant whining about the Clean Power Plan and start using it to prove, if that's possible, that they can actually do something about the climate crisis.
* The Clean Power Plan is usually described as reducing
emissions from the electrical generating sector by 30 percent between 2005 and
2030. But since half that reduction has already been achieved (for reasons
other than the plan itself), we have about a 15 percent reduction to deal with
going forward.
