EPA Finalizes Its Plan to Replace Obama-Era Climate Rules
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If you want to argue for small government, fine, I can't really argue against that, just own that as your position. However framing the policy this way is just dishonest. We know for a fact that free markets do not provide an answer for externalities like pollution and climate change and the only reason to say this is to buy political cover for the real motivation.
>While it instructs states to reduce emissions, the new measure sets no targets. Instead, it gives states broad latitude to decide how much carbon reduction they consider reasonable and suggests ways to improve efficiency at individual power plants.
That is always a great way to get things done, just leave everything up to what others think is "reasonable".
Well, the free market answer is to fix a fair price for the externality, and then let the free market work. The issue, of course, is defining what the "fair" price is. What's the fair price of carbon? Depends on how bad the damage is going to be. How bad is that? Depending on who you listen to, what your time frame is, and how much other carbon is added on top of it, the answer might vary by two orders of magnitude.
The way you normally do that is through government regulation which this policy is completely abdicating.
>The issue, of course, is defining what the "fair" price is. What's the fair price of carbon? Depends on how bad the damage is going to be. How bad is that? Depending on who you listen to, what your time frame is, and how much other carbon is added on top of it, the answer might vary by two orders of magnitude.
These are all things that are perfectly reasonable to debate. I have no complaints if you have logically reached a "fair price" that is drastically smaller than the "fair price" I have reached. That is not what this administration is arguing. This administration is arguing that "fair price" is already baked into the market. That is an indefensible position.
I wouldn't call it regulation. I would call it a tax or a fee. (Of course, there would have to be a regulation that controls the tax or the fee, but the point isn't regulation. The point is to collect the money.)
> ... which this policy is completely abdicating.
No argument.
Would it be fair to say that free markets answer externalities, but only when they become so severe that the market producing the externatlities itself becomes degraded? Not really an exception to your statement, more of a ludicrous technicality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_the_U...
They include most environmental organizations, e.g. Sierra Club and Greenpeace.
The Tennessee Valley Authority is closing 2 coal plants:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-coal-tva/tva-votes-to...
And is looking to go solar:
https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/business/aroundregion/st...
Also an interesting read:
https://energyinnovation.org/publication/the-coal-cost-cross...
""" Constructing new wind and solar projects would be less expensive than continuing to run 74 percent of existing U.S. coal plants, according to a new study. That number jumps to 86 percent of coal plants by 2025. """
And just a couple of months ago TVA opened a 53-megawatt solar plant in my area, and they are promising that it will produce enough power to run thousands of homes plus some industrial-scale stuff. I haven't yet been able to find output stats for the two newest installations which I've already mentioned, but I have been monitoring a third local solar installation of basically identical design. And even under "ideal" conditions it's only producing 60% of its promised one megawatt output, and on average only a small fraction of it. (I don't know if it's always been that way or if the situation has deteriorated in the five years it's been in operation.) If TVA keeps building out solar plants which on average only produce a small fraction of their promised output, then before long they're going to be in trouble.
This is a general problem with wind and solar; they only produce a fraction (on average) of their "nameplate" (full capacity under ideal conditions) output, yet "nameplate" is what gets quoted in press releases and such. But actual average capacity may be only 25% of that (to use a ballpark number), meaning that you have to divide the quoted capacity by four to get a far more realistic capacity. Meaning that the 1/1000th number that I quoted above is probably actually more like 1/4000th!
My comment wasn't intended to say solar/wind is killing Coal because it isn't. Natural Gas is what is killing coal. I'm from Kentucky originally and the economy is feeling the squeeze from coal just not being really economically viable for some use cases compared to natgas. As the tech improves and mass production makes it cheaper, solar / wind will continue to make more economic sense. The currently "top of the line" most efficient solar panels as of 2019 come from SunPower and only are a paltry 22.2% efficient so there is a lot of room for improvement. Regarding renewables being a fraction of their "nameplate" capacity it really just depends on too many factors to generalize.
As to that local installation, I drove by it the other day and saw no obvious tracking issues or anything like that. When I took a tour of it about a year after it opened, they said that it had already become obvious that the inverter system was going to be finicky and that it was going to an ongoing challenge to keep that in tip-top shape, given the expense involved. So after five years I could easily envision a situation where the panels and tracking system are still going strong, but the inverter system has degraded to the point where it can only spit out 60% max.
> immediately drew a flurry of challenges, with attorneys general in California, Oregon, Washington State, Iowa, Colorado and New York saying they intended to sue to block the measure.
I'm a bit confused here by these 2 statements. Why would states sue, or even have the authority to, when the Federal government is delegating control to the states?
A popular approach so far has been to argue the proper process for rule changes hasn't been followed. I'm not sure that applies here, but in many cases there are legal steps to changing regulation. You can't just wake up Tuesday and say "I think stop signs are going to be green."
Separately and more applicable in this case, states can argue they're being harmed by this particular set of federal rules. This can further be tied to already-existing law, essentially arguing that a new regulation is incompatible with a law passed by Congress. As an example, the EPA can't simply approve dumping industrial waste chemicals into waterways, because the Clean Water Act says otherwise.
> “It could foreclose a new administration from doing something more ambitious,” she said.
I think I get what they're trying to say here, but there's nothing the Supreme Court can do during a moderate administration to "foreclose" more aggressive targets in the future. They can only answer specific questions. Just because the last 1A case was on a relatively uncontroversial form of speech or petition, doesn't mean that 1A is restricted in scope, it just means that it's not particularly harshly tested by the present case.
The argument they're making is frankly ridiculous. The Supreme Court not finding a moderate policy to be unconstitutional does not preclude you from trying more aggressive policy in the future in any way.
It wasn't ruled unconstitutional, it was stayed by the Supreme Court while a lower court decided if the rule was within the EPA's regulatory power under the Clean Air Act. Then the Trump administration came into power and asked the court to put the case on hold while they rewrote the regulations.
Maybe that's causing the confusion within the rest of your post, because it isn't a question of constitutionality.
If the Supreme Court rules that the EPA "only has authority over environmental infractions at individual plants, like chemical spills and improper handling of hazardous materials", a rule from the EPA like this might not be possible again.
My misunderstanding from all the words going around.
> If the Supreme Court rules that the EPA "only has authority over environmental infractions at individual plants, like chemical spills and improper handling of hazardous materials", a rule from the EPA like this might not be possible again.
AFAIK the Supreme Court does not tend to rule on whether you "only" have the authority to do something, they're more likely to rule that a given thing is something that you don't have the authority to do. Maybe it's different when it comes to federal agencies, on that I'm ignorant. It seems more likely that the Supreme Court simply takes no issue with the new policy, rather than making a broad pronouncement about what future policy could be.