EPA Approval of New Power Plants: Failure to Address Global Warming Pollutants

Today’s hearing will examine carbon dioxide emissions from new coal-fired power plants.

Pending before the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and state agencies are dozens of applications to build new coal-fired power plants. These power plants are huge and they are enormous sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

A single plant — the White Pine plant proposed in Nevada — will emit over a billion tons of CO2 over its lifetime. If approved without carbon controls, this one plant will emit as much carbon dioxide as all of the vehicles, factories, and power plants in South Dakota.

Scientists say that we need to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% from today’s level to avoid catastrophic global warming.

This is a big challenge. It will require all sectors of our economy to become more efficient and cut their emissions. But these changes are absolutely essential to prevent irreversible climate change.

The very last thing we should be doing is making the problem worse by approving massive new sources of uncontrolled CO2 emissions.

But that is exactly what the Bush Administration is doing.

The Administration’s policy is the climate equivalent of pouring gasoline on a fire. The approval of new power plants without carbon controls is irresponsible; it is indefensible; and it is illegal.

Our lead witness today is EPA Administer Stephen Johnson. For most of his tenure, he has been able to avoid climate change issues by saying that EPA lacks the legal authority to regulate CO2 emissions.

This changed in April when the Supreme Court ruled that Administrator Johnson does have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

Two of the largest sources of greenhouse gases are motor vehicles and power plants. To date, public attention has been focused primarily on EPA’s record on vehicles. It is not an encouraging record. Administrator Johnson has yet to take any action to control CO2 emissions from cars and trucks. And he has been ignoring a request by California to regulate these emissions for almost two years.

Today we are going to look at EPA’s policy on power plants. In August, EPA took its first regulatory action since the Supreme Court ruled. EPA granted a permit to a new coal-fired power plant, the Deseret plant in Utah. EPA didn’t require any pollution controls for greenhouse gases. And it didn’t consider other alternatives, such as renewable energy sources.

It’s as if the Supreme Court never ruled and EPA never heard of global warming.

As we will learn today, the potential consequences of this “business as usual” policy are enormous. The Deseret plant is relatively small. But there are dozens of applications for much larger power plants pending before EPA and state air pollution agencies. If these plants are approved without carbon controls, they will emit billions of tons of CO2 emissions.

Let me put these emissions into context. Eight Northeastern states have shown great leadership by adopting the first regional program in the United States to cap and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But the approval of just one of the pending power plants would wipe out all of the gains these states are trying to achieve.

These power plants can cost a billion dollars to build. They last for 50 to 60 years. And we don’t have the technology yet to retrofit them with carbon controls. As a nation, we will do irreversible damage to our climate change efforts if we follow this short-sighted policy.

Addressing the threat of climate change poses many difficult and complex issues. But permitting the construction of massive new sources of uncontrolled CO2 emissions should not be one of them. While we struggle to develop the right policies for reducing our emissions, we should not be making our problems worse by approving a new generation of unregulated coal-fired power plants.