Investor's Business Daily
written by Paul Driessen and Willie Soon
Monday June 6, 2011
If Federal Register notices, press releases and activist campaigns assured progress, the Environmental Protection Agency's proposed rules for 84 power plant pollutants would usher in vastly improved environmental quality and human health.
Unfortunately, the opposite is likelier.
EPA's immediate target is older electrical generating units (EGUs), most of which have substantially reduced emissions to safe levels but still release more pollutants than modern plants.
However, its broader agenda is to use air pollution and carbon dioxide restrictions to impose President Obama's goals of requiring "zero" emissions, "bankrupting" coal companies, causing electricity rates to "skyrocket" and effecting a "fundamental transformation" of the U.S. energy system and economy — regardless of what Congress may do or the American economy may require.
This raises vital questions that thus far have received scant attention.
How many older plants can be retrofitted to meet the new criteria? How many will simply be shuttered? Can coal, gas and nuclear replacements get the necessary permits, survive legal challenges and protests, and be built in time to replace the lost baseload electricity: potentially 2,290-3,950 megawatts in Illinois alone? Can intermittent wind and solar energy make a meaningful contribution or be built in time?
With several plants already scheduled for retirement by 2014, due to EPA's proposal, the future is murky. Yet, even more fundamental questions remain unasked and unanswered.
Do power plant emissions really pose health risks? Do any relevant, trustworthy studies support EPA's health claims? Can we trust any claims, data or mandatory standards from EPA and groups that are campaigning for the new rules?
Don't Blame Coal
Available evidence raises deep suspicions, especially since EPA is recruiting, guiding and supporting many of the health, environmental and other activist groups that are promoting its anti-power-plant crusade.
A recent Heritage Foundation study discovered that EPA gave at least $3.8 billion in taxpayer money to various nonprofit and advocacy organizations over the past decade, including the American Lung Association and self-styled "environmental justice" groups. The agency's handling of two key pollutants further illustrates how far the agency appears willing to go.
Government, academic and other studies reveal that America's coal-burning power plants account for perhaps 0.5% of mercury in the air we breathe. The rest comes from forest fires, Chinese and Indian power generators, human cremation, and especially volcanoes, subsea vents and geysers. Even eliminating every milligram of EGU mercury will do nothing about the other 99.5%.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, blood mercury levels in U.S. women and children declined steadily during 1999-2008 and are already well below excessively "safe" levels set by EPA. Studies of Seychelles Islands children and analyses by the World Health Organization and U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry confirm that no American children are even remotely at risk from mercury.
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