Tuesday - March 27, 2012

EPA Is Out To Screw Us All

I guess I spoke too soon with that court ruling on the EPA and the coal mines. The EPA just announced it’s proposal to HALVE emissions on all future coal and oil fired power generation plants.

The Environmental Protection Agency proposed limits on greenhouse-gas emissions from new power plants on Tuesday, taking the first major regulatory action to address climate change as promised by President Obama‘s administration soon after he took office in 2009.

“We’re taking a common-sense step to reduce pollution in our air, protect the planet for our children, and move us into a new era of American energy,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a statement released with the regulations.

The “new era” for energy will mean less reliance on coal, which currently provides nearly half of U.S. power supplies, and greater use of cleaner-burning natural gas, the EPA said in a release summarizing the rules. The agency is proposing that new fossil-fuel power plants — namely those fired by coal and natural gas — emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon per megawatt-hour of energy produced. That’s about the same amount of carbon emissions produced by today’s natural gas-plants and about half the amount of produced by coal plants.

“EPA’s proposed standard reflects the ongoing trend in the power sector to build cleaner plants that take advantage of American-made technologies, including new clean-burning, efficient natural-gas generation, which is already the technology of choice for new and planned power plants,” the EPA release said.

Even before EPA officially announced the rule, environmentalists were cheering and critics of the agency were jeering. The rule is sure to reignite a fight over climate change both in Congress and on the campaign trail.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member James Inhofe, R-Okla., immediately vowed to fight the rule by introducing a congressional resolution to nullify it. “This plan is the most devastating installment in the Obama administration’s war on affordable energy: It achieves their cap-and-trade agenda through regulation instead of legislation,” Inhofe said at a hearing on Tuesday.

Hey Climate Change deniers - deny this!! It doesn’t matter what you say, what proof you’ve found that the whole Carbon thing is a lying phony scheme, it doesn’t matter that at least half the population is against it. The EPA - which apparently has the power to regulate us to death WITHOUT Congressional approval!!!!! Tyranny! - is going ahead and doing whatever the hell it wants to to fight greenhouse gases and climate change, AND YOU CAN’T DO JACK SHIT ABOUT IT, YOU STUPID WINGNUT LOSER.

The regulation, which was due to be released last July but was held up at the White House, stemmed from a settlement with environmental groups and states. The government already controls global warming pollution at the largest industrial sources, has adopted the first-ever standards for new cars and trucks and is working on regulations to reduce greenhouse gases at existing power plants and refineries.

Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, an advocacy group fighting coal-fired power, said in an interview that the regulation shows that President Barack Obama is moving to a cleaner energy future.

“It’s a strong move,” Brune said. “It means there will never be another coal plant built without new technology and it probably means even those won’t be built because they can’t compete.”

Other advocacy groups, however, said the regulation was imperfect, since it “grandfathers” in existing plants.

“EPA also must focus on the main source of power plant carbon emissions—existing coal-fired plants, many of them more than 50 years old, which are responsible for nearly 40 percent of U.S. carbon emissions,” said Kevin Knobloch, the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who said the regulation was a historic step to “trim” carbon emissions.

Even if the proposal did result in no new coal-fired power plants being built in the U.S., the coal would be exported and burned for electricity elsewhere, contributing to global warming. Export would also increase emissions because of the pollution from the transportation.

But Republicans said the new rule could not come at a worse time, with concern about high gasoline prices and energy taking center stage in the presidential election.

Fox News on TV is reporting that the combination of old plants closing and new ones having to spend dozens of millions more per boiler to install carbon catching filters will likely cause a TWENTY PERCENT jump in the price of electricity. Oh yeah, that one won’t have any downstream economic impact at all, will it? Other than causing the price of everything to nearly double.

So I guess the energy companies will just have to build nice clean non-polluting nuclear generators instead. Oh wait, that’s not allowed.

Well then, they’ll build natural gas fired ones, using all that natural gas the Canadians want to sell us. Oh wait, we not going to get that pipeline, are we?

Well then, the whole darn Northeast seems to be sitting on a massive deep deposit of natural gas. Let’s get to frakking and get it out. Oh wait, that’s not going to be allowed either. Shit.

And Obama keeps a campaign promise after all. Allow me to quote the One, from his 2008 campaign:

And you can guess the result ... and it wasn’t any unintended consequence from some well intentioned piece of legislation. This is a purposeful, tyrannical move by a branch of the government without any oversight or voter control to destroy the nation. PERIOD.

The proposal does not cover existing plants, although utility companies have announced that they plan to shut down more than 300 boilers, representing more than 42 gigawatts of electricity generation — nearly 13 percent of the nation’s coal-fired electricity — rather than upgrade them with pollution-control technology.

Rolling blackouts much? Welcome to the Turd World you dumb crackers, population: you.

Too bad the greenies didn’t really get their way: they wanted this proposal to apply to current power plants too, which would have shut down half the power plants in the nation overnight. Way to kill the economy stone dead, fuckwits. But that’s what they really want: they want half the population to die off, and the rest of us to live shivering in caves, dressed in Renewable Resource Rags™ while eating our government supplied daily ration of bean paste. Because greenies are the ultimate Luddites: they believe that fire is bad, and anything and everything that has come from that is wrong and must be abolished.

Posted by Drew458     on 03/27/2012 at 12:43 PM   
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Government •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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