The AP reports that permits for as many as 100 proposed coal-fired power plants have been effectively put on hold until the Obama administration decides how it wants to proceed. An EPA appeals panel ruled that it unjustifiable not have imposed carbon dioxide limits on the proposed Bonanza power plant. It described carbon dioxide as “the leading pollutant linked to global warming.” Celesias.com has the backstory.
Back in May, the Sierra Club went before the Appeals Board of the Environmental Protection Agency (EAB) arguing that the air permit for Deseret Power’s proposed 110 MW Bonanza coal-fired power plant should be overturned because it failed to require any controls on carbon dioxide pollution. As a result of their appeal, yesterday the EAB rendered a decision that will force any new or proposed coal-fired power plants to address the question of how they plan to limit their carbon emissions through “best available control technology” (BACT). You can read the decision here (pdf) and the official Sierra Club statement here …
How did Sierra Club argue the case? As Climate Progress explains, they relied on the Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts vs, EPA . In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Air Act gives the EPA the right to regulate CO2 and that greenhouse gases meet the definition of a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. As such, they must have an established BACT in order to limit their secretion into the environment …
This jibes well with President-elect Obama’s campaign statements that he would expect the EPA to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. And according to the AP , this decision will stop the permitting of as many as 100 coal-fired power plants. Nobody knows for how long, but for long enough to determine what constitutes BACT and certainly long enough to have an Obama EPA in place to help determine those criteria.
Well anyhow, here’s a discussion on whether tire inflation is better than drilling when it comes to getting more energy. It doesn’t address the question of coal fired plants as such. My guess is that they are not strictly substitutable since power plants provide energy over the grid. But the tire inflation argument is really a specific instance of what one might call the conservation versus production debate. In this case the argument against building a coal plant is that it is environmentally damaging. Well what do we do?
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25 Comments
1. Ann:You are kidding, right?
Nov 14, 2008 - 2:55 pm 2. Ann:ANYBODY IN AMERICA, not you, knows that properly inflated tires save more energy than offshore drilling. Which the big oil companies are too lazy to do anyway with THE THOUSANDS OF LEASES THEY ARE NOT USING.
Nov 14, 2008 - 2:57 pm 3. Steve:… and when they finally admit that the world has been *cooling* for the last few years, what then … ?
Nov 14, 2008 - 2:57 pm 4. Larry Sheldon:“admit” hell.
What is going to be interesting is when people start dying from the cold.
At 70 years of age, I’m a little worried, but we do have a wood burning stove and a little firewood.
I’m not sure I want to live through the collapse anyway.
Nov 14, 2008 - 3:16 pm 5. Roderick Reilly:Larry, do you have BACT plan for your wood-burning stove?
Ann, are the oil companies even allowed to use those leases?
Nov 14, 2008 - 3:25 pm 6. Herb:This is outrageous! He has questioned the One!
Clearly a racist tool of Big Oil.
What’s an “Ann”? Clearly doesn’t understand oil or business.
FWIW Ann, A lease doesnt necessarily have oil. Its a right to explore and maybe drill. If they dont get any indication of oil or a likelihood of it, they dont drill. At current sub $60 oil a lot of sites where there may be oil are not going to be drilled because the expense exceeds the return. Thats called economics. You could look it up.
Sorry for the digression but ignorance requires first aid.
Nov 14, 2008 - 3:36 pm 7. slade:What’s interesting about energy is that the numbers do the talking – unlike geopolitical concerns where subjective judgment, not to mention what we used to identify as “wisdom”, is as crucial as empirical facts.
Energy should be a no-brainer policy.
Dopey old us.
Nov 14, 2008 - 3:45 pm 8. sgi:Uh-oh. Here come the Tire-inflation Ticketers! I bet Ann would love a job like that.
Nov 14, 2008 - 3:53 pm 9. Herb:One of the issues that needs to be addressed in the stall of all of these power plants is about economic growth. I note that we are entering a recession that many think will be a rather nasty one. But we’ll get over it.
When we do we’ll need electricity. . .and lots more than we use now. Power plants take time to build. For the effects of a lack of electricity see Baghdad in 2003-7 or California in their recent past. This civilization runs on petroleum and electricity made from it or coal. That will not change for decades.
Any assertion that the last statement is wrong must surmount the fact of our current investment in equipment that uses these sources of energy. All of that equipment from light bulbs to lawnmowers and airplanes would have to be replaced. Conserving our way to Eden must face the same fact.
A lot of this stuff is less efficient than it may ought to have been, but that lack of efficiency made it more durable or cheaper and more available to more people. W wrote about the fallacy involved in the drive for the “just so”. Most of us recognize that perfection isnt available. (Here.)
Those that would try to force perfection would destroy everything good because it wasn’t perfect.
W also wrote of the refusal of the Communists to recognize the failure of that system long after it was apparent and to continue to kill to support an obviously hopeless effort. What happens when the CO2/AGW religion collapses? Will we proceed with sequestration and scrubbing?
What if we burn wood to keep warm when no eelctricity is available?
Nov 14, 2008 - 3:57 pm 10. steeple:Ann, what do you know about major oil companies? Do you work at one, or have any close friends who do? I don’t, but I’m in the energy industry and I am constantly amazed at what these guys do. Drill a well in 10,000 feet of water to a depth 3 or 4 miles below the surface, and then extract the minerals out without spilling a drop of it along the way? Please be careful before you call these guys lazy.
Could you pls show me your calculations on how much energy is lost due to poor tire inflation vs. what additional production is available offshore? Not that we shouldn’t do both, but I would like to see your analysis.
We have to do less shouting and more thinking.
Nov 14, 2008 - 3:59 pm 11. wretchard:The role of coal and additional drilling offshore or in currently reserved areas can’t be determined without reference to our global objective function. That’s a fancy term for the sum of the things we want to optimize: economic growth, national security, energy independence, environmental preservation. None of those desiderata can be optimized without a trade off against each other. We have to assign weights to each of them and find a combination of policies which gives the best combination, given what is valued.
In a situation where environmentalism is paramount, national security and energy independence, even economics, will take a backseat. Other combinations will emphasize economics or energy independence and assign “global warming” concerns a relatively small weight.
But we can’t have our cake entirely and eat it too. So if you go the tire guage route that takes you one place. If you go the drilling and coal plant route, that takes you another. Where on this frontier of outcomes do we want to wind up?
Nov 14, 2008 - 4:02 pm 12. whiskey:That’s Obama’s weakness.
Republicans can and should run the Howard Jarvis route. Jarvis, alone and mocked for years, ran on a low-tax, populist program. He beat all the pie-in-the-sky utopians, including proto-Obama Jerry Brown.
A populist organization, calling for and end to EPA regs on Carbon Dioxide, and drill baby drill, coal baby coal, to provide cheaper gas and particularly electricity, is a pocket book issue.
One that argues directly against “the One” and his utopian, “I’m rich so I can afford to pay high energy prices and eat arugala” class-based appeal. Obama’s election was the triumph of the elites, but it carries with it a requirement to deliver good times to the people. Obama’s strength, particularly his worship as a messiah, allows huge exploitation by savvy populists particularly along gender lines.
The more men are single, for longer periods of time, the more their acquisition of wealth, and protecting that wealth, becomes paramount. Guys don’t win in the Welfare State because it produces lots of women sharing a few dominant men, and causes lots of churning envy that can be harnessed by populist forces. Arguing for single guys, to maximize money in their pocket by low taxes and low electricity/energy costs. This also picks up seniors (limited budget) and married couples.
Inflating your tires does not put money in your pocket which as a young single man you can use to attract women, or as a senior or married couple you can sock away for needed expenses. It’s a feel-good social bit designed to appeal to the Oprah crowd, effective in limited doses but creating it’s own backlash the way Oprah is hated by most men (watch Kimmel or listen to morning Drive Time DJs).
Nov 14, 2008 - 4:30 pm 13. RWE:Let’s see now, I got out to my car, check the tire pressures, decide it is too low (I keep it way higher than they recommend anyway), go turn on my compressor to get some high pressure air, and the compressor comes on and runs and in so doing uses …. electricity.
Electricity produced by a coal fired plant. Not a nuclear plant because the environmentalists decided long ago that the far less polluting nuclear plants were Politically Incorrect.
Here locally, the people who moved in next door to a coal fired power plant and then discovered that someone had slipped the nasty thing in beside their houses, presumably in the middle of the night, and some 30 years before they ever showed up, finally got their wishes. The place is being torn down. It will be replaced by a far cleaner natural gas burning plant that will not be powered by the immense supplies of natural gas off Florida’s west coast. It seems that the people who live over there discovered that someone had slipped in a bunch of natural gas under their scenic seaside areas in the middle of the night about 3 billion years ago or so. I hate it when that happens.
Aside from all that nonsense, there is basic difference between producing more energy and using less of it. You can’t use less of what you don’t have in the first place.
By the way, Socialists concentrate on what people use and Capitalists concentrate on what people produce. That says it all right there when it comes to the Tire Pressure Versus Drilling Argument.
Nov 14, 2008 - 4:52 pm 14. bill-tb:Hot, you sweat, cold you die. If the current solar trend continues, it will soon be so cold that even the dumbest amongst us will know Al Gore is an idiot.
Electricity is the lifeblood of modern society. Take that away, ration it, or limit it and kaput goes society. Why do you think they are working overtime to get electricty generation up and running in Iraq?
Just think if Africa had some DDT manufacturing plants and coal generating plants supplying electricity to all areas. Instead we send bread.
Nov 14, 2008 - 5:15 pm 15. sgi:From FactCheck.org as reprinted in Newsweek:
Summary
We are issuing a split decision in the Obama vs. McCain dispute over whether proper tire inflation could save as much oil as expanded offshore drilling is likely to produce.
We find that proper tire inflation could save more than a billion gallons of fuel per year and do it several years sooner than expanded drilling could produce a single drop. McCain has exaggerated by representing Obama’s suggestion as a silly notion or implying that it constitutes his entire energy policy.
But we also figure that expanded offshore drilling is projected to produce far more oil eventually than can be saved by proper tire inflation – nearly three times as much even by the conservative estimate of government experts, and more than 10 times as much if an industry-endorsed estimate is correct. And even taking into account additional fuel savings from tune-ups, which Obama also mentioned, he greatly exaggerated.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/153140
Nov 14, 2008 - 8:07 pm 16. RWE:The fuel savings from tune ups claim is really absurd.
I used to have to tune up my old 78 Celica every 10K miles or so, and even it required far less maintenance than earlier autos.
Modern engines use electronic fuel injection and electronic ignition systems. Platinum plugs last 50K miles or more. Many cars feature 100K mile tune ups. There just ain’t much left that you can “tune up.”
Nov 14, 2008 - 8:23 pm 17. Pay Attention:–ANYBODY IN AMERICA, not you, knows that properly inflated tires save more energy than offshore drilling. Which the big oil companies are too lazy to do anyway with THE THOUSANDS OF LEASES THEY ARE NOT USING.
Poor Ann, these are concepts she learned in school, but she is unable to coherently express them. They are Gaia propaganda anyway.
The leases that are being unused are either uneconomical or are tied up by environwacko’s – many as lucid as Ann – who oppose any activity on the land leased by those exploration companies.
Nov 14, 2008 - 9:00 pm 18. Dave:Slightly off rhinoceros here, but not by much.
All too often overlooked in the discussion of electrical energy is the fact that while there
are elebenty-leven zillion ways to generate it, means of storing it are pitifully inadequate.
John McCain mentioned, then did not follow up, on establishing a $300 million prize for the invention of what Robert Heinlein called the “Shipstone”.
Shipstone is to Diehard as H-Bomb is to firecracker.
Imagine a battery no larger than a suitcase that could hold at least 3/8ths of a megawatt
and be rechargeable within the hour.
This technology would make total electric cars, homes, factories and (propeller-driven)
aircraft a reality.
The recharging could come from a variety of sources. Including orbiting solar stations.
Of course, hanging on an developing all this requires coal and oil. And a few nukes as well.
Horsehockey about tire inflation and tuneups
only serves to disguise what a certain number of people actually want: A forcible reduction in the number of human beings allowed to exist.
Harsh words on my part, but I will stand by them. Witness a certain poster hereabouts who wants to (a) nuke vast quantities of human beings and (b) deny all mankind the petroleum-based ability to produce enough food for the current population.
WE may need to stat yelling “conspiracy” at the top of our lungs.
Nov 14, 2008 - 9:08 pm 19. Demosophist:I like the way Whiskey thinks. I can’t really find fault with it, except in the sense that I don’t think the Liberalism 2.x ideas of Jarvis really cut it in this age. We’d all prefer non-intervention and zero-government, but we’ve also become somewhat resigned to the fact that that’s a pipe dream. Oh God, did I say that out loud?
That said, there’s a difference between the bayeux tapestry and a pile of old thread. The details matter because the pattern matters.
Nov 14, 2008 - 9:46 pm 20. SpeakEasy:The biggest flaw in the “tire pressure” plan is an assumption that all tires, or a significant number, are poorly inflated. This in turn appears predicated on a simple experiment: Ask anyone at random if their tires are exactly inflated to the optimum amount of pressure. Most would say either I do not know or I guess so. Either answer could allow for an inaccurate assessment that the tires are not properly inflated. Take your sample, multiply by total number of cars registered and PRESTO! You have just given birth to an energy plan. Congratulations.
On the other hand, assume that all tires, or a significant number are inflated at the exact (or close enough) optimum pressure. Would you build an energy plan around an optimistic assumption? Then why would you do so with a pessimistic one?
And why isn’t anyone questioning it?
Nov 15, 2008 - 9:11 am 21. winslow:Lighten up guys, Ann could have been using sarcasm.
Nov 15, 2008 - 10:04 am 22. Konyok:AGW is an excellent example of the overwhelming power of a runaway meme.
During the second half of the 20th century the western world gained an awareness of the need to control pollution. Engineers and applied scientists responded with an array of inventions to dramatically reduce toxic emissions, especially airborne.
The common thread to most successful measures to reduce air pollution is to to facilitate clean combustion. (Obviously, industrial processes involving the distillation, catalysis or blending of materials require containment technology.) Increasing the efficiency of combustion of hydrocarbons has both increased fuel efficiency and reduced the amount of toxic emissions. This was necessarily achieved by reducing dirty pollutants to clean, relatively inert CO2. (From this perspective, the idea of “CO2 pollution” is an oxymoron. By definition, pollution consists of toxins that are dangerous to children and other living things.)
The goal of 20th century environmental engineers was explicitly to simplify combustion exhaust to CO2 and H2O. This was a technical achievement to to rival the Apollo program. (Nobody seems to remember the killer smogs of 1950’s London … )
Now, the solution to the pollution problem of 50 years ago is portrayed as the cause of even greater danger to the entire planet.
There is good reason that EPA dragged its heels about setting CO2 emission standards, above and beyond the Bush administration’s embrace of the evil oil industry. There is not even one successful carbon sequestration pilot program anywhere on the planet, let alone an operating prototype. EPA lacks the technical knowledge to write applicable CO2 standards for power generation plants. (Not just coal powered plants, gas powered turbines will be the next target.) This is not because of stupidity or political fecklessness, it is because a) ALL of the existing regulations and protocols share the goal of replacing toxic pollution with clean CO2, and b) there is no “low hanging fruit” solution to this technical problem. Carbon dioxide is almost as chemically stable as water, therefore it is difficult to detect and difficult to trap. Rube Goldbergesque containment schemes can be drawn on paper, but there is no way to specify standards based on both empirical and theoretical knowledge. Nobody knows how to do it and nobody knows how to test whether anything done actually works. (Nicely specific carbon footprint numbers are extrapolations based on material mass balances, emphatically NOT on instrument measurements.)
So, the notion of global warming is threatening to upend the entire edifice of methodological and regulatory tools that so successfully mitigated air pollution in the western world. (Of course, new industrial powers like China have not even implemented the 20th century pollution controls, let alone carbon sequestration.)
Nov 15, 2008 - 12:14 pm 23. Dave:Thank you, Konyok. A liter of the best Georgian wine to you—-soon as I can find some.
This whole bit about CO2 is a scam, because
CO2 is what you get when you get rid of dangerous stuff.
Additionally check out jerrypournelle.com for a recent piece on glaciation and how fast it can occur. And how much more dangerous it is than warming.
And BTW, what can limit/retard/prevent glaciation? Carbon Dioxide coupled with
Dihydrogen Monoxide.
If H Sapiens is having an effect on global climate, it is a beneficial one.
Nov 15, 2008 - 4:06 pm 24. Pseudo-Polymath » Blog Archive » Monday Highlights:[...] The election and energy. [...]
Nov 17, 2008 - 7:10 am 25. Stones Cry Out - If they keep silent… » Things Heard: e41v1:[...] The election and energy. [...]
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