New Source Review stands for now

Charlotte Observer | 06/06/2007 | Green groups lose effort to block Duke plant

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!! STOP BUILDING COAL POWER PLANTS NOW!!! – NO MORE COAL WITHOUT SEQUESTRATION!!

How’s that for a bumper sticker?

The N.C. Utilities Commission upheld its March decision to allow Duke to build one 800-megawatt unit. The commission in March had rejected Duke’s request to build two units. Environmentalists subsequently asked the regulators to reconsider their decision allowing one unit.

The commission’s ruling shifts the battle over Duke’s proposed Cliffside project to the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources, the agency that is considering an air quality permit for the proposed power plant. When the draft permit is issued later this year, the organizations will likely contend that the Cliffside project is not using the cleanest technology available and is falling short of federal air quality standards.

“We’re using all available legal tools to stop a dirty power plant from being built,” said Michael Shore, a senior air policy analyst at N.C. Environmental Defense. “Everything is an attempt to delay and hopefully prevent construction.”

In their appeal to the utilities commission, the environmentalists contended that the Cliffside project is not the most economical choice, but rather the “worst-cost” option. Last year, the capital cost of two Cliffside units was estimated at $2 billion, but this year Duke revised the costs, saying that building one unit would cost $1.8 billion.

The cost of building, financing, maintaining and operating power plants is paid by utility customers through electric rates.

Note that this project at the enormous cost of 2 billion dollars is funded entirely by increases in NC utility bills. So, not only are they shafting us thoroughly, they’re using our money to do it, the temerity. I am pissed off, and I have no choice to buy power from anyone other than the morons at Duke Energy where I live. it’s Duke, or candlelight for me!

The battle shifts to the NC-DENR, which will need to issue an air quality permit. It’s time for all groups involved to delay this project until NC comes up with a viable climate change mitigation policy that wil make plants like these completely unviable. It’s a good thing that this is the exact strategy they’re going for! Maybe our legislators and regulators should take the time to read their local paper.

On some days, stretches of Nags Head have no dry beach, and visitors have to sit under the front-row houses at high tide. The resort that once thrived by the sea is being swallowed by it.

“We are losing the town,” Cahoon said. “As sea level rises, our tax base goes away.”

Other, more subtle changes are under way along the coast, not just on the fragile barrier islands. As salt water pushes farther upriver, some rivers are widening into estuaries, tidal bodies of water where fresh and salt water mix. Freshwater swamps are changing to salt marsh.

Let Cooler Heads Prevail

Read the column, take a deep breath and marvel at the utter dishonesty. George Will is supposedly one of the less extreme conservative columnists out there. But I guess when it comes to this issue, he has no qualms about misleading, setting up strawmen, and actually lying. I don’t think I can add any to the rebuttal from Progress Report…

On Sunday, conservative pundit George Will used prime space in the Washington Post and other major papers to suggest that not only is global warming not the result of human activity, but that global warming may not exist at all. There is no evidence to support Will’s claim, so he resorted to distortion.

WILL SUGGESTS GLOBAL WARMING MIGHT NOT EXIST: George Will notes that global temperatures have risen about one degree over the last 100 years, but that “might be the margin of error when measuring the planet’s temperature.” Embarrassingly, the only support Will provides for this statement is a crude analogy. (“To take a person’s temperature, you put a thermometer in an orifice or under an arm. Taking the temperature of our churning planet, with its tectonic plates sliding around over a molten core, involves limited precision.”) There is not a shred of scientific evidence to support Will’s position that the earth is not warming. Science Magazine analyzed 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming published between 1993 and 2003. Not a single one challenged the scientific consensus that the earth’s temperature is rising due to human activity.

LIES, DAMN LIES, AND GEORGE WILL’S CITATIONS: The highlight of Will’s column is a list of citations from the 1970s of publications that purportedly warn of “global cooling.” (Nevermind that, even if it were all true, it does not function as an analytic rebuttal to scientific evidence of global warming caused by human activity.) The first such citation is from a December 1976 edition of Science Magazine which warned of “extensive Northern Hemispheric glaciation.” The use of this quote is outrageously dishonest. First, the article in question deals with variations in the earth’s climate based on variations in the earth’s orbit over periods of 20,000 years or longer. Second, the article explicitly excludes the effect of humans on the climate. (The article states its predictions apply “only to the natural component of future climatic trends — and not to such anthropogenic effects as those due to the burning of fossil fuels.) George Will is clearly counting on the fact that most of his readers will not have access to a 1976 edition of Science Magazine.

And it goes on to rebut every one of his bromides. Read it! Here’s a media issue that Will brings up:

About the mystery that vexes ABC — Why have Americans been slow to get in lock step concerning global warming? — perhaps the “problem” is not big oil or big coal, both of which have discovered there is big money to be made from tax breaks and other subsidies justified in the name of combating carbon.

Perhaps the problem is big crusading journalism.

Perhaps the problem is utter lack of federal leadership on this issue. To use my favorite “If they can put a man on the moon” line of reasoning, Armstrong did not make it to the moon because a bunch of Americans on the street were “quick to get in lock step concerning the Moon program” (ah, to use Will’s own words). It took a coordinated effort on the part of government to establish clear targets, pump in a lot of money, and marshall the scientific resources towards achieving the target. And this was an engineering problem with a specific target and solution. Deal with the complex, only partly characterized beast that is global climate and even an idiot would conclude that no amount of individual awareness, innovation or market effort is going to be sufficient.

Dealing with climate change requires a lot of effort on the part of a lot of people, it will require individual ingenuity, sacrifice and market forces, but it starts with the will to do it (and the George Will to not stand in the way!), and the will, as has been the case with many projects in the country starts with federal leadership and the injection of the federal dollar.

If the president stood up every day and beat the drum about climate change at half the intensity with which he talks about “Exporting Democracy”, most people would listen and get in “lock step”. In this respect I guess we live in an idea monarchy! It has everything to do with who’s doing the convincing!

Update

 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=90

The folks at RealClimate rebutted this very same comment from Will in December 2004, so this is an old, recycled lie. When will these pundits realize that in this day and age of a million fact checkers and gotcha people, you can’t really get way with this kind of BS. On the other hand, I guess he does not care.

This is the NY Times headline, not mine!

Judges Overturn Bush Bid to Ease Pollution Rules – New York Times

But on Friday, the court said the agency went too far in 2003 when it issued a separate new rule that opponents said would exempt most equipment changes from environmental reviews — even changes that would result in higher emissions.

With a wry footnote to Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass,” the court said that “only in a Humpty-Dumpty world” could the law be read otherwise.

“We decline such a world view,” said their unanimous decision, written by Judge Judith W. Rogers, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. Judges David Tatel, another Clinton appointee, and Janice Rogers Brown, a recent Bush appointee, joined her.

The winners this time —more than a dozen states, including New York and California and a large group of environmental organizations — hailed the decision as one of their most important gains in years of litigation, regulation and legal challenges under the Clean Air Act.

The provision of the law at issue, the “new source review” section, governs the permits required at more than 1,300 coal-fueled power plants around the country and 17,000 factories, refineries and chemical plants that spew millions of tons of pollution into the air each year.

The proposed rule would have allowed powerplants to avoid putting new controls in as long as the cost of equipment did not exceed 20% of the replacement cost of the plant. Fuzzy math, anyone! This would have let to major incentives to not build new plants using cleaner technology, but keep the “grandfathers” running. A lot of the old plants were exempted from some of the strict controls by being grandfathered into the act. Well, call me cruel, but grandfathers eventually die! I thought of this proposed rule as the “Bionic Grandpa” provision! Glad that the courts did not like it.