The Dirty Coal Caper:
Creating the "Old Zone" Hole in the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill
By Scott Thompson
"You can summarize the problem and prove that the bill is inadequate in a very simple way... you
just have to look at the proposed policy and see if it allows coal to
continue to be used and emit the C02 in the atmosphere." - NASA
scientist James Hansen
by
about 2030 - no exceptions - beginning with a moratorium on new
coal-fired power plants. And not using unconventional fossil fuels such
as tar sands. (See his website on global warming, www.columbia.edu/~jehl).
Well,
this is pretty strong stuff. There are many, many millions of lives at
stake in the future. The stability of civilization itself is on the
line, as well as the very existence of countless other species that we
humans have no right to destroy.
On
the other hand, executives in the tripartite coal industry - coal
producers, railroads, and power companies - have fat piles of
shareholder money for which they're responsible. As well as their own
golden parachutes. For them, what to do was a no-brainer: they
deployed their expensively clad lobbyists to protect that nest egg of
dirty old coal plants.
In
the summer of 1986 I drove to Gillette, Wyoming, from Colorado for a
job interview as a counselor. To get there you go north through
Cheyenne and Wheatland, past the forested mass of Laramie Peak, and
into the open space of the Powder River Basin. The vast sky there
brightens the flat infinity of dried-out prairie grass, and even in
July you can sense the winter frigidity of the northern plains, like a
cold finger touching your skin.
On
Highway 59, still eight miles south of Gillette, I spotted a plain
metal coal company sign hanging on a gate in a barbed-wire fence. I
glanced up and saw the faint outline of a huge open pit coal mine out
east.
I didn't get the job.
Wyoming
coal is booming. Union Pacific and Burlington Northern trains, pulling
over a hundred coal cars each, lumber across the sun-burnt grasslands
of South Dakota and Nebraska toward markets as far away as
Massachusetts and Georgia - to old but massively profitable coal-fired
power plants.
Wyoming
is by far the most productive coal state. For every coal train of equal
size curving and creaking through second place West Virginia, there are
three lumbering out of Wyoming.
The
market for Wyoming coal was created by the 1970 amendments to the Clean
Air Act, which set limits on the sulfur content of coal in an effort to
reduce acid rain. Although Wyoming coal is sub-bituminous, meaning
that it has lower heat value than the bituminous coal of the
Appalachian Basin, it is also lower in sulfur content.
A sweet deal for Wyoming coal producers.
And
the dirty old coal-fired power plants that buy so much of that Wyoming
coal became cash cows for power companies thanks to the 1977 amendments
to the Clean Air Act. These amendments made 1974 Environmental
Protection Agency regulations - termed "New Source Review" - into
federal law. New Source Review requires power plants beginning
construction after June 1,1975 to
This
much they accomplished in the Waxman-Markey climate bill, which passed
the House of Representatives 219-212 on June 26, 2009 (obviously the
coal industry prefers no climate legislation).
In that bill the coal lobbyists and their allies in Congress protected the dirty old coal plants with three deft strokes:
First,
by utilizing the same strategy as in New Source Review: leave out the
old coal plants from the new, rigorous requirements. And that's
exactly what the Waxman-Markey bill does; it places no specific C02
emission limits on any old coal plants as long as the power company
meets its yearly generic cap for C02 emissions, which it can expand
like an accordion by (a) also using its yearly quota of "tree-planting"
offsets, and (b) snagging extra offsets under safely valve provisions
(if the market price for carbon permits spikes too high), and (c)
simply buying more permits on the carbon market.
Second,
by prohibiting the Environmental Protection Agency from conducting any
New Source Review of any coal plants for C02 emissions. And indeed, a
few sentences in the mass of pages in the bill stripped the EPA of
this vital power.
Third,
by making the carbon emission permits free. And guess what, 8o96 of the
initial permits will be given away at no cost; they will provide cover
for those dirty old coal plants for an additional 15 years at least.
Waxman-Markey is yet another free ride, allowing the old plants to keep
belching out C02 at the same rate as always, without
have scrubbers installed to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.
From
the power companies' point of view, the solution in this situation was
simple: don't build new power plants. Just keep the dirty old ones
cranking along because under the law the toxic chemicals they spew out
don't count. Besides, a lot of the old power plants were already paid
for. (See Jeff Goodell's Big Coal: the Dirty Secret Behind America's
Energy Future for much of the foregoing).
But
a new threat to those dirty coal plants has emerged, now that the good
old days of Bush administration suppression and bullying of climate
scientists have ended. Vital research on the imminent dangers of global
warming has hit the streets, as well as the specter of meaningful
climate legislation.
From
the climate scientists' viewpoint, there are two fundamental problems
with coal. First, it emits 2596 more C02 than petroleum per equivalent
dose of energy and almost twice as much as natural gas, making it by
far the dirtiest fossil fuel, even ignoring its other toxic emissions.
Second, the world's coal reserves are far greater than its remaining
reserves of petroleum and natural gas.
There
is broad agreement among climate scientists on the cutting edge of the
research that if all of the remaining fossil fuel reserves are burned,
or anything remotely close to that, the planet will pass "tipping
points" that will hurl it into an unstoppable and catastrophic process
of global warming. This will be fed in large part by escalating
feedback loops of ice sheet and glacier melts and releases of methane
gas from warming ocean sediments and melting permafrost. (See Fred
Pearce's With Speed and Violence for concise descriptions of the
tipping points).
According
to James Hansen, the consequences will likely be disintegration of the
West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, with possible sea level rises
of six or more feet by the end of this century and 50-100 feet or more
overall. This will devastate human coastal civilization and cause
massive species extinctions from collapsing ecosystems. And deprive
millions of people of water when the glaciers feeding their rivers have
melted.
Hansen's
agenda is basic: first, humanity must not pass these tipping points,
and second, the concentration of C02 in the atmosphere, now 387 parts
per million and rising by 2 ppm each year, is already dangerously high
and must be lowered to 350 ppm or less fast.
To Hansen this means phasing out all coal not subject to C02 capture and storage
raising the power companies' overhead even a cent.
And
the party isn't over yet. New coal plants on the boards with
construction permits dated 1/1/09 or earlier will get the same free
ride as the dirty old coal plants (James Hansen is burning blue over
this; rightfully so). (See Carl Pope, Trip Van Noppen, and Eric
Schaefer, "No More Loopholes for King Coal," 8/19/09, www.sierraclub.org).
On
the other hand, maybe those deft strokes came a little too easily, even
for the coal industry. Could there be a bigger picture here?
In
October, 2002,1 attended a media conference at Albuquerque Academy,
sponsored by the New Mexico Media Literacy Project. Brilliant yellow
leaves hung from the slender trees around the large, adobe-style
buildings; people from college faculties all over the country chatted
and hobnobbed. I attended an afternoon presentation in a second floor
classroom by Sheldon Rampton, co-author of Toxic Sludge is Good for
You, a classic on the public relations industry.
Sheldon
doesn't have an effusive personality, but he knows how to unpack a
narrative. Soon he had us riveted on the story of Edward Bernays.
Widely
regarded as the father of the modern public relations industry, Bernays
was a nephew of Sigmund Freud and pioneered the use of psychological
principles in the art of public persuasion. In particular, he fostered
the "third party principle," which remains a fundamental strategy.
It
was brilliantly exemplified in the "torch of liberty" parade that
Bernays engineered in the 1920s. His client, American Tobacco Company,
sought to expand its market by torching the longstanding taboo against
"respectable" women smoking. A psychoanalyst advised Bernays that
smoking is a sublimation of oral eroticism and for this reason
cigarettes are a "symbol of freedom" for some women. Bernays then
arranged for attractive debutantes to march in New York's prominent
Easter parade, each waving a fit cigarette and proclaiming it a "torch
of liberty." He made sure publicity photos covered this event
world-wide. Afterwards, socially respectable women smoked and smoked
(Toxic Sludge is Good for You, pp. 22-26).
Here
is the lesson for neophyte public relations students. The smoking
debutantes served as "third party experts" on behalf of American
Tobacco Company because their credibility as social trend-setters was
persuasive to the target audience of American wom-