11/14/2023 0 Comments Carbon tax trump![]() ![]() “The technology is out there and available,” Duffy said in an interview. Jay Duffy, litigation director for Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group with offices in Boston and the Netherlands, said carbon capture hardware hasn’t been installed widely on power plants in America because there has been scant financial incentive to do so. The infrastructure law of last Congress provided $62 billion for a variety of emissions-cutting programs at the Energy Department, including more than $10 billion for carbon capture technology, and the 2022 climate law included carbon capture tax credits plus $2 billion in funding for carbon dioxide removal technology, a related but separate field to carbon capture. So for every unit of input you put into a gas turbine, you’re getting more electrical output,” he said. The proliferation in recent years of gas, often more efficient than coal, as a fuel source for power plants is also behind coal plant closures, Westerman said. House Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., said two coal plants in Arkansas, including an Entergy-run plant in his district, are closing, in part because of federal climate regulations. That report found heat and the retirement of coal plants, among other forces, placed the northern Midwest at risk of blackouts. Tiffany cited a May 2022 report from North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a private sector organization that monitors the stability of the country’s power grids, as a reason to keep fossil fuel-fired power plants online. ![]() The areas of the country with the strongest potential for wind power are the regions that stretch from the U.S.-Canada border, through the Great Plains states and down to Texas. “It just isn’t the best place for these intermittent sources of power.” “We’re not in a windy region, and we don’t have sun for a significant amount of the year,” Tiffany said. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., said his home district, in the state’s north, is not ideal for wind or solar power. Renewables, which the EIA considers wind, hydropower, solar, geothermal and biomass, generated about 22 percent of electricity in the country last year, more than nuclear (18.2 percent) or coal (19.5 percent). Though wind and solar are intermittent sources, large battery systems can store electricity for down periods, and renewables last year surpassed nuclear power as a larger source of electricity, according to the Energy Information Administration. “We have to make sure that the power that is being used to power those electric cars and those electric stoves or what have you, is coming from cleaner sources and producing fewer emissions.” “While they’re also making big important moves on things like transportation rules, the power sector really is at the heart of so much of tackling the climate crisis,” Burke said of the coming EPA rule. Holly Burke, a spokesperson for Evergreen Action, a climate advocacy group, said though transportation generates more emissions, cutting carbon pollution from the electricity sector is vital to lower emissions from other portions of the economy, like industry. greenhouse gas emissions, according to EPA data. “That’s a game-changer that we needed.”Įlectric power is responsible for 25 percent of U.S. “I think that the ability for EPA to regulate combustion plants under the Clean Air Act, and actually address carbon emissions -that’s a game-changer,” said Levin, an environmental lawyer before coming to Congress. That figure is currently set at $51 per ton of emissions, though the EPA has proposed raising it to $190, and a study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the nonpartisan Resources for the Future published last year in Nature estimated the cost should be $185. The federal government uses what’s called a “social cost of carbon” - a metric placing a dollar figure on the societal and environmental damage of pollution - to scrutinize rules it writes. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said he hopes the regulation considers the “terrible social cost of carbon emissions.” ![]() The ruling was based on an arcane legal theory, called the “major questions doctrine” and lately popularized in conservative legal circles, that federal agencies cannot act on big decisions without specific direction from Congress. In June 2022, the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, with the three liberal justices dissenting, that the EPA does not have authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon pollution from power plants through a system to cap emissions because Congress did not specifically authorize it to do so. ![]()
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