PrintOctober 17, 2008
Under Obama, everybody will have to hold their breath...
Well, perhaps that's a slight exaggeration. Actually, Obama is all set to finger carbon dioxide as a "dangerous" pollutant:
From Bloomberg:
Barack Obama will classify carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant that can be regulated should he win the presidential election on Nov. 4, opening the way for new rules on greenhouse gas emissions.The Democratic senator from Illinois will tell the Environmental Protection Agency that it may use the 1990 Clean Air Act to set emissions limits on power plants and manufacturers, his energy adviser, Jason Grumet, said in an interview. President George W. Bush declined to curb CO2 emissions under the law even after the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the government may do so.If elected, Obama would be the first president to group emissions blamed for global warming into a category of pollutants that includes lead and carbon monoxide. Obama's rival in the presidential race, Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, has not said how he would treat CO2 under the act.Obama ``would initiate those rulemakings,'' Grumet said in an Oct. 6 interview in Boston. ``He's not going to insert political judgments to interrupt the recommendations of the scientific efforts.''
This move cheapens the definition of "dangerous pollutants" and is a grandstand stunt by Obama because his real play is to aggrandize the EPA and give them more power over American industry.
What might be the consequences of such a move?
Placing heat-trapping pollutants in the same category as ozone may lead to caps on power-plant emissions and force utilities to use the most expensive systems to curb pollution. The move may halt construction plans on as many as half of the 130 proposed new U.S. coal plants.
The power companies will probably now switch from coal to oil (or perhaps natural gas) because the technology to trap emissions from oil burning plants is cheaper. Of course, it's one more source of foreign oil we'll be dependent on if that happens (natural gas is abundant in America and would not need to be imported).
What this law would represent is a quantitative increase in the power of the EPA:
The EPA under Bush fought the notion that the Clean Air Act applies to CO2 all the way to the Supreme Court. The law has been used successfully to regulate six pollutants, including sulfur dioxide and ozone. Regulation under the act ``could result in an unprecedented expansion of EPA authority,'' EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson
said in July. The law ``is the wrong tool for the job.''
As if the enviro-bureaucrats aren't powerful enough?
