(Washington, D.C.): Our air, water, and lands are much cleaner and healthier than they were on April 20, 1970, the first nationwide celebration of Earth Day (organized with the help of original ELI Board Member Sydney Howe). But major environmental challenges, including climate change, continue to this day.
There are numerous applications for large linear energy projects – natural gas pipelines and electric transmission lines – that will affect the lands, waters, and resources of the Chesapeake region. At the same time, the states in this region are experiencing challenges in meeting their goals for conservation of lands, waters, and natural and historic resources. New and revised state-level practices can address the impacts of proposed projects and improve land conservation outcomes.
(Annapolis, MD): A new report prepared by the Environmental Law Institute for the Chesapeake Conservation Partnership, a network of conservation organizations and natural and cultural resources agencies, recommends specific actions that Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia may consider to address the impacts of proposed energy projects while improving land conservation outcomes.
“My administration is putting an end to the War on Coal. . . . I made them this promise: we will put our miners back to work.” President Donald Trump’s war meme first emerged as a political strategy to defeat candidate Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential election. After Obama prevailed in that contest, coal and power industry executives, lawyers, lobbyists, and coal-friendly politicians joined in a concerted effort to stall the administration’s regulatory initiatives aimed at scaling back coal mining and coal-fired power plant pollution.
Tens of millions of dollars from coal interests were channeled to support print, radio, and television advertisements claiming the Obama EPA and Interior Department were engaged in job-killing and economy-snuffing. For example, Friends of Coal, an arm of a West Virginia coal trade association, warned, “Mining is a way of life and if it is stopped by the EPA it will kill the local economies and thousands will lose jobs!” The National Mining Association claimed in a radio ad that EPA’s Clean Power Plan regulation of coal power plant emissions would cause consumer electric bills to jump by 80 percent. The Washington Post’s fact checker column found the ad to be “a case study of how a trade group takes a snippet of congressional testimony and twists it out of proportion for political purposes.”
Robert Murray, CEO of leading producer Murray Energy, used War on Coal rhetoric, declaring, “We don’t have a climate change problem. It is not real and not scientifically based. It’s a theology. It’s politics. And it’s an agenda.” EPA is “packed . . . with radical environmentalists, never created a job in their lives, never produced anything for society, but sat there writing rules all day,” Murray charged.
Fact-bereft slogans and sound bites aside, agencies administering and enforcing environmental laws regulating mining operations and power plants definitely have an agenda — one mandated by Congress via statute. It is regulatory agencies’ fundamental responsibility to limit the negative economic and social externalities of industrial pollution.
When a coal company discharges acid mine drainage or selenium, contaminating a watershed, or a power plant emits mercury, acid precipitation, or climate changing air pollutants, the per-ton price of coal excludes these health, esthetic, social, and environmental costs. Such regulatory actions actually promote healthy energy market competition. Absent effective regulation, companies whose mining waste is dumped into streams and power companies who burn the fuel and whose stacks belch greenhouse gases pay nothing to use local communities and the environment generally to dispose of their waste.
The industry’s attack on Obama regulations represented its time-tested strategy of denial, or minimization, of the externalized costs of coal. The anti-regulatory War on Coal campaign is neither new, nor uncharacteristic of the mineral’s promoters. For decades the industry touted the fuel as America’s most affordable, dependable energy resource. More recently, advocates disingenuously promote “clean coal” as an essential element of national security and the reliability of the U.S. electricity grid.
There is a measure of genuineness to the affordability claim — prices remained artificially low for generations because they failed to reflect the true costs of the pollution caused by mining and burning the fuel. Mining did put bread on tables, provided a decent living, and contributed substantially to local economies when the coal market was in one of its periodic boom phases. But it is also indisputable that, for more than a century, coalfield communities have been plagued by a market-controlled, debilitating economic cycle of boom and bust. There has never been broad-based prosperity in coal country. Rather, under-funded schools and public services, high unemployment, and meager employment opportunities beyond minimum wage jobs have long been the reality in communities where, historians say, coal was king.
A brief examination of regulatory actions demonized by pro-coal interests is revealing. The Obama EPA was not intent on destroying coal jobs. Rather, environmental regulatory agencies acted in good faith to enforce the Clean Air, Clean Water, Surface Mining Control and Reclamation, and Resource Conservation and Recovery acts. These laws were passed after decades of virtually unregulated industrial emissions, rationalized by polluters with maxims like “dilution is the solution to pollution” and “where there’s smoke there’s jobs.” The new laws passed in the 1970s were intended to cut harmful air, water, and toxic pollution by mandating environmental regulators to focus on internalizing the costs of pollution the power generation sector had dodged for decades.
Rather than seeking to comply with measures that would limit pollution, coal interests most recently attacked the Obama EPA’s Stream Protection Rule that limited waste discharged into Appalachian headwater streams — the remains of ridgetops blasted apart by huge mountaintop removal strip mining operations.
Also targeted were the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards. EPA analysis reported that these new standards would forestall up to 11,000 premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks, and 130,000 asthma attacks every year. The agency found that the value of the rule’s air quality improvements for human health totaled $37 billion to $90 billion each year. That means for every dollar spent to reduce this pollution, Americans get up to $9 in health benefits.
A rule intended to prevent coal ash containing mercury, cadmium, arsenic, and other heavy metals from contaminating surface and groundwater was condemned as part of the War on Coal, notwithstanding the fact that for decades millions of tons of these power plant wastes had been discarded annually in hundreds of unlined landfills and impoundments across the country.
Coal interests’ most strident denunciation of EPA regulation was reserved for the Clean Power Plan and Obama executive orders that paved the way for the United States to join 195 other nations in the Paris Agreement, described by the signatories as “for the first time [bringing] all nations into a common cause to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects.” Each of these measures have been nullified or are in the process of being withdrawn by the Trump administration.
The hyperbolic fact-bereft War on Coal slogans demonizing these Obama regulatory efforts served to obscure long-denied, yet irrefutable costs of unregulated and under-regulated mining and burning. Avoidance of those costs permitted artificially low pricing that for decades undercut coal’s energy market competitors. A 2011 New York Academy of Science study penetrated the myth of “cheap, affordable coal.” It examined each stage of the lifecycle of externalities, including extraction, transport, processing, and combustion, finding “multiple hazards for health and the environment.” The academy monetized the costs to the public, finding the total as “a third to over one-half of a trillion dollars annually.”
The academy’s study emphasized that many of the externalities are cumulative. It explained that “accounting for the damages conservatively doubles to triples the price of electricity from coal per kWh generated, making wind, solar, and other forms of non-fossil fuel power generation, along with investments in efficiency and electricity conservation methods, economically competitive.”
Yet for almost a century, the coal industry evaded regulation. Even after the accumulated externalized costs of coal were realized, and addressed by Congresses in the 1970s that enacted environmental and mine safety laws, coal executives tasked their lobbyists and lawyers to repeatedly challenge agency efforts by administrations of both parties to implement and enforce those laws.
This history informs an understanding of the War on Coal strategy. The meme fired-up 2016 political campaigns and inflamed voter passions. Candidate Trump and friends of coal in both political parties curried voter favor by out-demagoguing each other in a scramble to show who hates regulation and loves miners the most.
During the campaign, Trump called climate change a hoax. Obama’s efforts to regulate carbon dioxide was “an overreach that punishes rather than helps Americans.” At campaign events in the coal regions of West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, he promised to bring back mining jobs — part of his plan to “make America great again.”
On one level, the War on Coal meme contains a kernel of truth. Coal production and employment had, indeed, declined significantly during the Obama years. However, the cause for the decline had little to do with government regulation. An inconvenient fact coal interests conceal is that the mining workforce has been decimated by the industry itself. Companies shed thousands of workers as mines grew increasingly mechanized.
Three factoids from the Bureau of Labor Statistics illustrates a trend. During the Reagan and Bush I presidencies, coal jobs dropped from 242,000 to 144,000. Coal mining jobs in Appalachia dropped 60 percent from 1985 to 2000. Industry employment slipped from 73,000 in 2000 to about 52,000 today.
Notwithstanding these huge job losses, mechanization drove production higher and higher. For several decades, coal garnered half of the electric generation market. The War on Coal meme blames regulation on its recent fall from grace as the fuel of choice for electricity generation. Not mentioned was the emergence of cheap shale gas. Beginning in 2010, gas rapidly seized market share, culminating in 2017, when it dethroned coal as the dominant fuel used to generate electricity. Natural gas’s advantage over coal’s remaining stake is predicted by the Energy Information Administration to continue in the future, and the emergence of gas-powered electricity has decreased the amount of carbon required for each unit of economic activity.
Beyond the surge of cheap natural gas, the cost of renewables — wind, solar, and hydro — continues to drop. Utilities are progressively integrating these carbon-free sources of generation into their portfolios, to the exclusion of coal plants. Wind and solar power represents two-thirds of all new electricity-generating capacity, and in some parts of the country they are cheap enough to compete with natural gas.
Many large U.S. utilities are rapidly shuttering power plants fueled by coal and switching to these alternatives. American Electric Power Corp., one of the country’s biggest utility companies, is “not planning to build any additional coal facilities,” according to spokeswoman Melissa McHenry, who added that “the future for coal is dictated by economics . . . and you can’t make those kinds of investments based on one administration’s politics.” Coal-fired plants comprise 47 percent of AEP’s capacity for power generation; it plans to reduce its use of coal plants to 33 percent by 2030.
Other factors contributing to plunging production and mining employment include depletion of the economically minable reserves in Appalachia and declining demand for exports. Moreover, Resources for the Future researchers report that “between 2002 and 2012, real per-ton extraction costs in Appalachia nearly doubled.”
The War on Coal attack on environmental regulation allows the industry to obscure another reason for sharply declining production and mining jobs. The five biggest U.S. coal companies sought bankruptcy protection in 2015 and 2016. Bankruptcy was not triggered by an increasing regulatory burden. In fact, company managers saw gold at the end of the rainbow in the form of skyrocketing commodity prices at the beginning of the century’s second decade. Acquiring other companies and their reserves when the price of coal hit historic highs, these companies assumed billions of dollars of leveraged debt.
When prices nose-dived, they could not service the huge debt that financed their buying spree. It was not a coincidence that the speculation-fueled bankruptcies coincided with the companies’ mine closures and termination of thousands of jobs. Major producer Murray Energy did not follow the acquisition stampede. Its CEO “watched it go on and shook my head . . . everyone was shoving liabilities to someone else.” As a consequence of these bankruptcies, more than 100,000 miners and their widows lost or may lose their pensions and health care benefits earned by decades of arduous work — blamed of course, on the War on Coal.
After the inauguration, the Trump administration charged out of the box to fulfill its campaign promises — notwithstanding the fact the coal industry was rapidly contracting as a result of competition and irresponsible market speculation. The new president ordered withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, killed President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, ditched limits on dumping power plant waste into streams, and is “reevaluating” regulation of toxic coal ash disposal.
Explaining his decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement, the new president explained it would result in “lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production.” Trump cited statistics produced by an economic model that projected the impact of the accord: by 2040, gross domestic product would decline by $3 trillion dollars, 6.2 million industrial sector jobs would be lost, and coal production would drop by 86 percent. Scholars found the model to be flawed. Yale economics professor Kenneth Gillingham observed that it was based on cherry-picked data and ignored the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Attending the flurry of presidential executive orders and agency actions reviewing, withdrawing from, or canceling Obama regulatory initiatives, Trump touted a seeming miraculous recovery of thousands of coal jobs. Signing an executive order surrounded by miners, the president announced, “I made my promise and I keep my promise. . . . We’re ending the theft of American prosperity and rebuilding our beloved country.” Vice President Mike Pence added, “The War on Coal is over.”
Interviewed on Meet the Press, then EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt claimed that “since the fourth quarter [of 2016] we’ve added almost 50,000 jobs in the coal sector, in the month of May [2017] alone almost 7,000 jobs.” A month later, Trump drew cheers from a miner-dominated rally when he declared, “Everybody was saying, ‘Well, you won’t get any mining jobs.’ We picked up 45,000 mining jobs. Well, the miners are very happy with Trump,” the president told the energized audience. In announcing the opening of a new mine that would employ just 80 miners in Pennsylvania, Trump exalted: “The mines are starting to open up, having a big opening in two weeks. Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, so many places. A big opening of a brand-new mine. It’s unheard of. For many, many years that hasn’t happened.”
American Coal Council CEO Betsy Monseu attempted to reinforce the message. “Changes in policy, regulations, and markets are already contributing to a stronger domestic coal industry,” affording “a path to sustainability and the ability to compete that simply wasn’t there in recent years prior, with the continuing threats of the Obama-era regulations.”
The claim that the fuel’s ability to compete had been strengthened and new mines are opening for the first time in many years was demonstrably erroneous. Contrary to claims of growing jobs, a Greene County, Pennsylvania, mine permanently shut down in January with the loss of 370 jobs “because the aging of the mine and adverse geological conditions . . . impaired the productivity of the mine and forced higher production costs.” A manager explained that “under these conditions, the mine is uncompetitive and not sustainable in today’s coal and electricity markets.”
To be clear, while government statistics do report a marginal increase in production and mining jobs in 2017, energy economic experts and even some industry executives concede that a return to the record high levels of the 1990s is not in the cards. Nor do they see any scenario in which mine production and coal-related employment will rebound to offset the thousands of jobs shed as gas and renewables surge. Reuters reports that full-year coal employment data from the Mining Health and Safety Administration shows total U.S. coal mining jobs grew by a meager 771 during 2017, not the 50,000 that Pruitt claimed.
The Energy Information Agency forecast in December “sluggish power demand, abundant gas supply and renewables growth . . . to continue to generate headwinds for coal use and limit the prospects for any resurgence in construction of new coal power plants.” The agency predicted demand for coal to decline 1 percent per year on average over the next five years.
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis recently predicted that “potential benefits from regulatory relief that has been promised by the new administration will provide little or no gain and the long-term prognosis for the industry in every region from now through 2050 is poor, as more coal-fired power plants will close and as utilities will continue to allocate capital away from coal.”
Thus, the Trump administration’s victory lap celebrating the deregulatory policies promised to put miners back to work is as much myth as its War on Coal meme.
Ironically for an administration pledged to deregulate, Energy Secretary Rick Perry proposed a rule in September 2017 that would disrupt electricity markets in order to subsidize coal-burning power plants scheduled for closure by their owners because they cannot compete with lower priced natural gas and renewable energy.
Research by the Energy Innovation and the Climate Policy Initiative pegged the cost of the proposed rule at “up to $10.6 billion annually . . . paid by U.S. businesses and residents and this subsidy would flow to roughly 10 companies and 90 power plants, and harm cheaper generation from natural gas and renewables.” Fortune reported that Trump’s proposed subsidy rule was opposed by the great majority of the U.S. power industry, “From market operators and conservative analysts to a bipartisan group of former FERC commissioners — except for those who would directly benefit from it.”
The five-member Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, four of whom are Trump appointees, rejected the proposed rule as contrary to the core tenet of its two decade-long policy of “support for markets and market-based solutions.” The FERC ruling emphasized that “under this pro-competition, market-driven system, owners of generating facilities that are unable to remain economic in the market may take steps to retire or mothball their facilities.”
Notwithstanding FERC’s rejection of Perry and Trump’s subsidy plan, efforts to prop up noncompetitive coal-fired power plants continue unabated. FirstEnergy Corp, whose subsidiaries operate nuclear and coal-fired generating plants facing bankruptcy, requested in late March that Perry immediately intervene and issue an emergency order under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act. The company asserted that “the very diversity of supply that baseload nuclear and coal-fired units provide is being lost more and more each day as more and more of these plants retire because their fuel security and resiliency are not properly recognized and valued.” The requested order would direct that FirstEnergy and other companies’ coal-fired and nuclear power plants be paid subsidies “for the full benefits they provide to energy markets and the public at large, including fuel security and diversity.”
Immediate criticism of the requested bailout came from such diverse groups as the National Gas Supply Association, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Sierra Club. “FirstEnergy’s latest attempt to spread a false narrative surrounding the reliability of the electric grid is nothing more than a ruse that will force Main Street consumers to pay higher prices,” said Todd Snitchler, director of API’s market development group.
Dena Wiggins, president and CEO of NGSA, emphasized that Section 202(c) is intended to be triggered by extreme power grid emergencies that, as the Trump-appointee-dominated FERC found earlier, do not exist. “Competitive markets have a long track record of delivering affordable power to customers. It would be counterproductive and send the wrong signal to the market for DOE to grant this request,” Wiggins stressed.
Even more ironic, Bloomberg News reported that Trump administration officials were considering another market-disrupting proposal. Trump has been urged by industry and coal-state officials to exercise authority under the Defense Production Act of 1950 to keep noncompetitive coal power plants online. The DPA was enacted, however, to give President Truman extraordinary authority over the availability of domestic materials production crucial to support the Korean War effort and has never been used to pick winners and losers in domestic energy markets.
Having “won” the War on Coal, the Trump administration and coal interests now seek not only to negate Obama’s effort to force internalization of the fuel’s true costs, but to subsidize coal use to protect the energy source from having to compete in a free-market environment against more affordable gas and renewables. But the War on Coal meme and the myth that the industry and coalfield communities are victims of job-killing regulation is dead. On the ground in mining communities, many recognize that while the fuel will continue to provide some employment, neither politicians’ promises nor a government bailout will allow production and miners’ jobs to return to historic levels. Given that reality, grassroots leaders in coal states are seeking creative ways to diversify their economies to provide educational and employment opportunities that did not exist when coal was king. TEF
Market forces, including cheaper power from natural gas and renewables, are driving coal plants to shutter and their owners to declare bankruptcy. Yet the Trump administration perversely continues to prop up an industry in steep decline.
Political leaders find the prospect of reorganizing complex governmental organizations seductive. Surely, the argument goes, reorganizations can break down silos and enable agencies to be better aligned toward common goals. And what better place than the Interior Department, which includes nearly a dozen large, distinct agencies that have complex missions that sometimes don’t line up together.
From the beginning of his tenure, Secretary Zinke has talked about undertaking a reorganization of Interior. I was interested in hearing what he had in mind, having developed some perspectives during my two tours of duty as the deputy secretary of the sprawling department and its 70,000 employees.
Despite the hype, much still remains unknown about the secretary’s plans. With the exception of one bright spot — Zinke’s proposal to establish a common regional structure for all of the department’s bureaus — it is difficult not to be disappointed in what remains a largely ill-defined plan to meet unclear goals.
The concept of co-locating major regional offices in hub cities, and adopting common regional boundaries for all of Interior’s bureaus, is a good one. The department works better when its bureaus have more opportunities to interact with each other, particularly at the regional level, where the vast majority of Interior’s resources are allocated and difficult problems are addressed and solved.
But there is little else to commend the plan. The notion that a single, rotating regional head from one bureau should have decisionmaking authority over other bureaus in contested, multi-bureau squabbles is a recipe for disaster. Regional officials need to work together better, and co-locating them is a good start. Setting up a Russian roulette system that gives one bureau authority over others in resolving interagency disputes, however, is sure to exacerbate infighting.
Simply put, conflicts will not be effectively resolved by randomly empowering one bureau over others. On many tough issues, Interior’s bureaus have shown that when guided by the department’s common, unifying mission and purpose, they eagerly work together toward that end. In my experience, the department’s workforce is extraordinarily dedicated to, and proud of, Interior’s goal of conservation, prudent use of our nation’s natural resources, and honoring and protecting our historic and cultural resources.
On the other hand, divisive dictates from the top that depart from Interior’s core mission and value system drive wedges within the department that no reorganization plan can overcome. Zinke’s full-throated push to achieve energy “dominance” by expanding fossil fuel development on public lands and in offshore waters, and his political team’s efforts to ignore, or outright deny, the climate change impacts that already are profoundly impacting every corner of the department’s vast physical and scientific dominion, illustrate the point.
On a brighter note, here are better reorganization ideas that future, less divisive administrations might pursue.
A future secretary, for example, could accelerate the sharing, and leveraging, of land management functions and expertise that are now stove-piped in three major land management agencies in Interior (the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park System, and the Fish and Wildlife refuge system), and one at the Department of Agriculture (the Forest Service). Why not extend, for example, NPS’s extraordinary talent at welcoming visitors to other land management agencies that are underserving Americans who crave more outdoor experiences?
Similarly, as President Obama pointed out in a State of the Union address, it makes no sense that two agencies in two different departments (FWS at Interior, and NOAA at Commerce) co-regulate endangered and threatened species.
Also, climate change impacts are challenging land, water and wildlife managers across the entire span of Interior. There is no playbook for how best to discharge stewardship responsibilities in the face of extended droughts, elongated and more intense wildfire seasons, the spread of invasive species, sea rise and storm surge impacts on coastal resources, and changing wildlife patterns. So wouldn’t it make sense to aggressively explore more collaborative science and management responses across agency lines to systematically analyze and address these new and already-present threats?
Hopefully, a future secretary and Congress will have an appetite to pursue these ideas, and more. While they are at it, they might take a cue from former Republican and Democratic secretaries who urged that Interior be renamed to reinforce its mission area, by calling it the Department of Conservation, the Department of Energy and Natural Resources or, my preference: the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
So there is a lot to discuss when it comes to a potential reorganization. But like so many tough issues addressed in the department, a successful outcome depends on dispassionate, inclusive analysis undertaken by knowledgeable, nonpartisan champions of Interior’s mission, complemented by congressional input and broad public engagement.
Perhaps Secretary Zinke’s plan will provide the spark to pull together such an effort. I will be the first to thank him, if it does.
Political leaders find the prospect of reorganizing complex governmental organizations seductive. Surely, the argument goes, reorganizations can break down silos and enable agencies to be better aligned toward common goals. And what better place than the Interior Department, which includes nearly a dozen large, distinct agencies that have complex missions that sometimes don’t line up together.
From the beginning of his tenure, Secretary Zinke has talked about undertaking a reorganization of Interior. I was interested in hearing what he had in mind, having developed some perspectives during my two tours of duty as the deputy secretary of the sprawling department and its 70,000 employees.
Despite the hype, much still remains unknown about the secretary’s plans. With the exception of one bright spot — Zinke’s proposal to establish a common regional structure for all of the department’s bureaus — it is difficult not to be disappointed in what remains a largely ill-defined plan to meet unclear goals.
The concept of co-locating major regional offices in hub cities, and adopting common regional boundaries for all of Interior’s bureaus, is a good one. The department works better when its bureaus have more opportunities to interact with each other, particularly at the regional level, where the vast majority of Interior’s resources are allocated and difficult problems are addressed and solved.
But there is little else to commend the plan. The notion that a single, rotating regional head from one bureau should have decisionmaking authority over other bureaus in contested, multi-bureau squabbles is a recipe for disaster. Regional officials need to work together better, and co-locating them is a good start. Setting up a Russian roulette system that gives one bureau authority over others in resolving interagency disputes, however, is sure to exacerbate infighting.
Simply put, conflicts will not be effectively resolved by randomly empowering one bureau over others. On many tough issues, Interior’s bureaus have shown that when guided by the department’s common, unifying mission and purpose, they eagerly work together toward that end. In my experience, the department’s workforce is extraordinarily dedicated to, and proud of, Interior’s goal of conservation, prudent use of our nation’s natural resources, and honoring and protecting our historic and cultural resources.
On the other hand, divisive dictates from the top that depart from Interior’s core mission and value system drive wedges within the department that no reorganization plan can overcome. Zinke’s full-throated push to achieve energy “dominance” by expanding fossil fuel development on public lands and in offshore waters, and his political team’s efforts to ignore, or outright deny, the climate change impacts that already are profoundly impacting every corner of the department’s vast physical and scientific dominion, illustrate the point.
On a brighter note, here are better reorganization ideas that future, less divisive administrations might pursue.
A future secretary, for example, could accelerate the sharing, and leveraging, of land management functions and expertise that are now stove-piped in three major land management agencies in Interior (the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park System, and the Fish and Wildlife refuge system), and one at the Department of Agriculture (the Forest Service). Why not extend, for example, NPS’s extraordinary talent at welcoming visitors to other land management agencies that are underserving Americans who crave more outdoor experiences?
Similarly, as President Obama pointed out in a State of the Union address, it makes no sense that two agencies in two different departments (FWS at Interior, and NOAA at Commerce) co-regulate endangered and threatened species.
Also, climate change impacts are challenging land, water and wildlife managers across the entire span of Interior. There is no playbook for how best to discharge stewardship responsibilities in the face of extended droughts, elongated and more intense wildfire seasons, the spread of invasive species, sea rise and storm surge impacts on coastal resources, and changing wildlife patterns. So wouldn’t it make sense to aggressively explore more collaborative science and management responses across agency lines to systematically analyze and address these new and already-present threats?
Hopefully, a future secretary and Congress will have an appetite to pursue these ideas, and more. While they are at it, they might take a cue from former Republican and Democratic secretaries who urged that Interior be renamed to reinforce its mission area, by calling it the Department of Conservation, the Department of Energy and Natural Resources or, my preference: the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
So there is a lot to discuss when it comes to a potential reorganization. But like so many tough issues addressed in the department, a successful outcome depends on dispassionate, inclusive analysis undertaken by knowledgeable, nonpartisan champions of Interior’s mission, complemented by congressional input and broad public engagement.
Perhaps Secretary Zinke’s plan will provide the spark to pull together such an effort. I will be the first to thank him, if it does.
David J. Hayes is executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at New York University School of Law. He was deputy secretary of the interior in the Clinton and Obama administrations.
is executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at New York University School of Law. He was deputy secretary of the interior in the Clinton and Obama administrations.
As the Trump administration persists in its agenda of shrinking federal clean energy commitments and boosting fossil fuels, the leading U.S. electricity industry trade group and a national environmental organization have some not-fake news for the president: “A clean energy transition is underway and accelerating.”
That conclusion stands despite Trump’s many actions aimed at tilting the United States toward more coal and other fossil fuel use and less renewable energy. Under the president’s proposed 2019 budget proposal, the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy would be cut by $1.3 billion to $696 million. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy would be zeroed out. At the same time, fossil energy research and development would receive $502 million, an $81 million increase over 2017. Astonishingly, DOE even delayed four energy-efficiency standards, leading a federal court to rule the delay was illegal.
What these and similar actions demonstrate is that the Trump administration doesn’t understand that “a clean energy transition is irrevocably underway and making extraordinary progress,” says Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s energy program. It is gratifying to see the electricity sector’s leadership “taking ownership of that transition” and “doubling down” on clean energy, he adds.
Recently, the doubling down took the form of an NRDC and Edison Electric Institute joint statement released at the meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. The statement sets forth 21 policy recommendations that will “continue to accelerate the clean energy transition” and that EEI and NRDC will work together on implementing.
Philip D. Moeller, an EEI executive vice president, also underscores that “the trend lines are pretty clear” as to the direction of the U.S. electricity system, which by 2050 will be far different from today, as coal plants expire after normal years of service and clean energy builds out. Moeller says clean energy progress will continue without disruption despite the budget cuts.
For EEI, the priority issues are electricity infrastructure siting and permitting, not funding. If the right policy signals were adopted to eliminate some of the uncertainties, “the capital is out there” for transmission lines and clean energy, Moeller adds. For example, if a potential project crosses federal lands, it is unclear who is in charge as different resources agencies weigh in, sometimes without distinct timelines and a resulting lack of accountability for making decisions. States use the Clean Water Act to deny permits, mainly for pipelines but also for transmission lines.
The joint statement notes that opportunities exist to reduce the cost and contentiousness of permitting and NRDC agrees with that, says Cavanagh. “We’re not agreeing on some kind of wholesale evasion or removal of federal environmental standards,” he says. But environmentalists are realizing that “we can do a better job in permitting essential infrastructure,” and NRDC is prepared to work with EEI to do that, he adds.
As an example, Cavanagh cites the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan. The DRECP is a 22.5 million acre zone of public and private lands in California, including 10.8 million federal acres, on which streamlined renewable energy permitting can occur while conserving desert ecosystems. In February, the Department of the Interior announced that it was exploring significant changes to DRECP federal acreage, which Cavanagh says is worrisome. But, he adds, neither DOI nor any other federal agency can stop the momentum described in the joint statement, the fourth NRDC and EEI have issued starting in 2003 but “by far the most comprehensive and ambitious.”
Accelerating progress notwithstanding, barriers remain that EEI and NRDC address with recommendations on how states can improve utilities’ clean energy incentives. Moeller notes that there is uncertainty about ensuring adequate returns for long-term transmission investments, an issue the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by court order must act on and whose resolution will impact clean energy.
For Cavanagh, a critical issue is that too many states continue regulating electricity companies as a commodity business where kilowatt-hour sales dominate all other considerations. As the joint statement makes clear, electricity should be seen as a service industry whose companies need earning opportunities associated with energy efficiency, renewable energy integration, and maintaining a reliable grid.
Don’t look to the Trump infrastructure plan for any help. The words renewable, solar, and wind are not in the plan, unlike oil and gas. But, as Cavanagh sees it, while the federal government can do damage, or be a partner, the most important partner is the electricity sector’s leadership itself and NARUC, trumping even Trump.
Clean energy progress is trumping Trump’s fossil fuels promo agenda.
The extreme cold weather in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic this winter severely tested the performance of the power grid, which has come to increasingly rely on natural gas for generation in a way that may have unforeseen consequences on air emissions.
The electric system relies on natural gas to fuel both baseload and peaking power plants. Baseload refers to the minimum level of everyday demand for electricity. Peaking refers to rapid, short-term demand such as that which occurs in the early evening as people return home at sunset.
Baseload plants powered by natural gas are generally highly fuel-efficient combined-cycle plants that emit a fraction of the pollutants of coal. To the extent that combined-cycle natural gas units operate instead of coal-fired units, there is an environmental benefit due to reduced emissions and waste. This shift has occurred intentionally, to reduce emissions, as well as naturally, due to the rapid and sustained drop in natural gas prices over the last decade. The use of natural gas for electricity production in the United States has grown since 2001 from approximately 10 percent to over one-third of total generation.
Natural gas has long been valued as a cleaner peaking fuel for turbines, which provide the ability to ramp up electricity output within minutes. But because natural gas supply can sometimes be constrained or otherwise restricted, many gas units have the ability to operate in dual-fuel mode: they can burn either natural gas or fuel oil. Fuel oil releases more pollution and is generally more expensive than natural gas, and therefore is not used for normal operations. However, it is stored much more easily and serves as a hedge against natural gas delivery interruptions or price challenges.
Since many operators of natural gas plants maintain an ability to burn fuel oil, in some areas, such as New York City, there are requirements that operators burn oil under certain grid or weather conditions to preserve natural gas supply and affordability, particularly for residential customers who may rely on gas for heating. In other instances, an operator may be forced to burn oil because natural gas has been diverted to residential heating or supply was otherwise disrupted, including due to weather-related malfunction.
During cold weather such as we saw in January, natural gas prices may in fact spike high enough that oil becomes the more economical fuel. Indeed, the Energy Information Administration reports that average peak power prices in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic for January 5 reached over $250 per megawatt-hour, compared with an average between $30-50/MWh in the previous six weeks.
As a result, the eastern grid burned a substantial amount of oil. In fact, preliminary data suggest New England burned more oil during this year’s two-week cold snap than the previous two years combined. During the cold weather, 35 percent of power generation in New England was from oil. In the Mid-Atlantic, oil-fired generation hit 10 percent. On a typical winter day, four percent of power generation is oil-fired.
This reliance on fuel oil to fill gaps in natural gas supply brings a staggering environmental cost. With regard to greenhouse gases, fuel oil has approximately 75 to 80 percent of the CO2 emissions of coal, as compared to roughly half for natural gas. Fuel oils also emit toxic metals and other hazardous pollutants. Finally, oil units emit sulfur dioxide at the same rate as coal and nitrogen oxides at three times the rate.
According to Massachusetts Energy and Environment Secretary Matthew Beaton, in January’s 15 days of cold weather, what New England “used in oil is the equivalent of approximately five percent of the total emissions reduction we need between 2014 and 2020,” referring to the requirement that the state achieve greenhouse gas emissions reductions of 25 percent below 1990 emissions levels by 2020. “Economically, this is a disaster for us in New England. Equally as important, environmentally the emissions and the profiles of what occurred in this timeframe are nothing but a disaster.”
To address these environmental impacts, many jurisdictions have imposed emission-rate limits, annual run-time limits, or are engaged in phasing out the use of these fuels altogether. Following the extreme cold this year, grid operators have become worried about units needed for reliability reaching emissions limits and thus being unavailable if there is another cold snap.
As Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) put it, this experience will serve as an important stress test of the evolving grid. Important vulnerabilities were identified and their potential solutions have a range of implications that we cannot ignore.
The author is grateful for the assistance of Kathy Robertson in developing this column.
Recent cold weather shows grid’s reliance on oil, upping emissions.
The award of the 2017 Nobel Prize for economics to Richard Thaler highlights the recognition that human behavior is more complex and irrational than the assumptions of conventional, still prevalent economic models. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who received the economics Nobel in 2002, described his astonishment that “our two disciplines seemed to be studying different species, which . . . Richard Thaler later dubbed Econs and Humans.” Kahneman warned of “theory induced blindness: once you accept a theory it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws.”
This debate is of extraordinary importance for the future of various national and international environmental programs. Many may rely on assumptions that are questionable, and in some cases perverse in their environmental consequences.
A 2013 study in Energy Policy examined the impacts of a water conservation program in a Massachusetts housing complex on overall electricity consumption, including impacts on household CO2 emissions. Participants reduced their water consumption by 6 percent, but electricity use increased by 5.6 percent compared with a control group. The reduced water use cut energy consumption for hot water heating, but overall increases in electricity use exceeded these energy reductions by two-fold. Taking into account EPA estimates of electricity lost in production, transmission, and delivery, energy use increases with associated upstream losses were six times greater than the energy saved through reduced hot water heating.
The authors state that “adoption of a more environment friendly choice in one domain may actually increase the likelihood of less environment friendly behavior in other areas.” At root is “moral licensing,” whereby people feel that socially or morally praiseworthy efforts in one area lessens the need to act in other areas. They warn that “a considerable amount” of environmental programs and funds might “actually have a much smaller — or even a negative impact on CO2 emissions” than evaluations indicate.
As early as 1970, Robert M. Titmus, a professor at the London School of Economics, concluded that economic incentives for blood donors in the UK adversely affected, i.e., “crowded out,” donors’ main motivation: altruism and civic duty. Increasing payments for blood donations, he found, can actually decrease blood supply. Since then evidence has grown that some economic-incentive programs to promote publicly desirable activities are perverse in their consequences.
Studies in Switzerland, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Washington state on public approval of proposed nuclear waste disposal facilities found higher acceptance when the motivation is the greater public good or civic duty, and that the introduction of economic incentives reduces public acceptance, sometimes more than 50 percent.
In the past, many economists examined empirically expressed preferences without analyzing the impact of external material incentives on intrinsic psychological and cultural values. Yet this distinction, and the interrelationship between external and internal motivation, is critical for understanding how a program to change environmental behavior may work. Already in 1997, a Swiss study concluded that “where public spirit prevails,” using price incentives may crowd out civic duty, and actually make achieving the goals of a particular project more difficult. The authors urged that price incentives should be “reconsidered in all areas where intrinsic motivation can empirically shown to be important.”
Sometimes it is argued that while the crowding out phenomenon might apply to populations in richer countries, developing nations would be more responsive to economic incentives. A 2015 American Political Science Review article concluded that private economic incentives in a World Bank eco-development project in the Himalayas had a “negative and significant” impact on existing non-economic psychological and cultural motivation to conserve forests in the project population.
Those reporting that the project reduced formerly intrinsic cultural motivations for forest conservation in favor of economic incentives had “lower levels of conservationist behavior” than those who continued to cite the primacy of cultural and environmental values. Collective and community material benefits did have a positive correlation on environmental motivation. But community approaches to resource management, as opposed to private ownership models, are often not favored by governments and aid agencies.
The Indian and American authors warn that many sustainable- and ecodevelopment projects appear to be based on unfounded, simplistic assumptions about the correlation between small household economic incentives and achieving environmental goals. In fact, such “sustainable development projects can have the perverse effect of undermining their own environmental goals.”
Of econs and humans — theory, moral licensing, and crowding out.
States are labs of carbon pricing in power sector and broader economy.
Harmonizing state environmental policies and wholesale markets.
