Climate and energy

Stories about this are popping up all over the web, but I’ll clip in from just a few. People are still figuring out the full implications of the EPA appeals decision, so there will probably be more articles to follow.

From Grist:

In a major win for environmentalists, the U.S. EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board handed down a landmark decision on Thursday that essentially puts a freeze on the construction of as many as 100 new coal-fired power plants around the U.S.

It will now be up to the Obama administration to develop rules on carbon dioxide emissions from such plants.

In July 2007, the EPA issued a permit for a proposed Bonanza coal-fired power plant in Utah. Lawyers for the Sierra Club, Western Resource Advocates, and Environmental Defense filed a request that the permit be overturned because it did not require any controls on carbon dioxide pollution. The enviros pointed to the Supreme Court’s April 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, which found that the EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

In its Thursday decision, the appeals board ruled that the Bush administration had failed to offer a good reason for not regulating greenhouse-gas emissions from the proposed Bonanza plant. The board kicked the permit request back to the regional EPA office in Denver, saying it should reconsider whether the best available pollution controls for CO2 should be required, and stressing that it must adequately explain its decision. “[T]his is an issue of national scope that has implications far beyond this individual permitting proceeding,” the board wrote.

“Essentially what this decision does is it gives the Obama administration a clean slate to decide what our nation’s energy future should be,” said Joanne Spalding, the senior attorney at the Sierra Club who argued the case before the board. “It puts it back in the lap of an Obama EPA to determine how to treat greenhouse-gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, and it gives the opportunity to establish policies that will essentially favor clean energy and impose restrictions on fossil fuels that emit lots of greenhouse gases.”

While greens are cheering the decision, at least one industry representative is calling it a win for his team. Rich Alonso, who represents utilities and power-plant developers for the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani and previously served as a senior air attorney with EPA’s enforcement office, points out that the board’s decision doesn’t explicitly require the EPA to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act; it simply remands the decision to the regional office.

“The EAB refused to side with the environmental groups and it found that the existing Clean Air Act does not require CO2 to be regulated,” Alonso said. “A ruling in support of regulation would have turned American industry on its head by forcing inappropriate and inflexible CO2 regulation across the country, instead of allowing Congress to develop a national program to address CO2.”

But Jason Hutt, another attorney representing utilities, sees a definite downside in the decision. “All permits in the pipeline are now stymied,” he told the Associated Press.

No matter what industry is saying, enviros see the ruling as a notable victory, even if only a partial one.

“It’s basically saying let’s stop and think before we build this whole fleet of new coal plants that will be putting massive greenhouse-gas emissions into the atmosphere,” said Spalding.

From the AP, via LJWorld:

Washington, D.C. — The Environmental Protection Agency was blocked Thursday from issuing a permit for a proposed coal-burning power plant in Utah without addressing global warming. The ruling by an agency appeals panel means the Obama administration probably will determine the fate of other similar plants.

The panel said the EPA’s Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas.

The matter was sent back to that office, which must better explain why it failed to order limits on carbon dioxide.

EPA spokesman Jonathan Shrader said the agency was reviewing the ruling by the appeals panel. He declined to say how many other coal plant permits might be affected.

Environmentalists and lawyers representing industry groups said the ruling stops the permitting of perhaps as many as 100 coal plants.

“In essence, this is a punt to the Obama administration,” said Jason Hutt, a lawyer who represents a number of utilities, merchant energy developers and refineries seeking permits. He said it also would affect permits for oil refinery expansion.

The Sierra Club had appealed the Bonanza permit. David Bookbinder, a lawyer for the group, said the ruling will stop the permitting of any coal burning power plants “while EPA mulls over what to do next.”

The gas is a product of burning fossil fuels and a leading culprit in global warming.

Bookbinder had led the club’s efforts to block the attempt by six electric cooperatives to build a second coal-burning generating unit at the Bonanza facility on the Uintah and Ouray Indian reservation in Utah, knowing a decision on carbon dioxide could have broad implications.

The co-op group, Deseret Power, had no comment about the EPA developments.

One interpretation of the decision (and I phrase it like that because coming from a family of lawyers, I can tell you that there is often no end in arguing these things, no offense to my loved ones) is that at this juncture in the U.S. regulation of CO2 as a pollutant, state regulators can indeed viably claim the authority to regulate CO2.

— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org