Renee Schoof
WASHINGTON -- The Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday that it would set standards for greenhouse gas emissions from the country's two biggest sources: coal-fired power plants and refineries.
Gina McCarthy, the assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, said it would be possible to hold down costs, add jobs and reduce overall emissions even as the plants continue to burn fossil fuels. She said it wasn't possible to estimate yet how much emissions would be reduced.
Scientists globally are in strong agreement that heat-trapping gases are accumulating in the atmosphere mainly as a result of fossil-fuel use and that sharp cuts in emissions will be needed in the next few decades.
The EPA's new regulations are likely to have only a modest impact on emissions despite worldwide consensus that dramatic cuts are needed to lower the risks of dangerous climate shifts. A plan to impose mandatory reductions on emissions died in Congress last summer.
The EPA rule would require standards only for new plants and those that make major modifications.
Under a provision of the Clear Air Act, existing plants -- about 500 coal-fired power plants and 150 refineries -- would continue to operate as usual until states impose their own regulations on the basis of EPA guidelines. McCarthy said state regulations aren't expected until 2015 or 2016.
The EPA already sets standards for other forms of air pollution under the Clean Air Act. The standards generally are set as a rate -- a certain amount of pollution per megawatt hour of electricity, for example. If a plant expanded and produced more power, it also would produce more pollution.
The EPA soon will begin talks with industry and environmental groups as it works to devise the actual standards. McCarthy said that the agency would take cost and technology availability into account. The agency will propose the power plant standards in July and issue the final decision in May 2012. It will propose the refinery standards next December and finalize them in November 2012.
"""'"David Doniger, the policy director of the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the EPA had taken a major new step that could make a significant dent in carbon pollution.
"This is not the be all and end all. It's not going to give us the surety of very deep reductions we need over the next decades. But it can get us started, and it's the tool we have under the law of the land as it is today," he said.
Jeff Holmstead, a former EPA air administrator in the Bush administration who's a lobbyist for the electric power industry at Bracewell & Giuliani, said it remains to be seen how strict the EPA would be, and he predicts the new standards will get delayed past the 2012 elections.
"I think it's going to be a real problem for them," he said. "They're out trying to reassure everybody this is going to be reasonable and no big deal. If that's what they do then they're not going to be any reduction of emissions and they're going to make the environmental community upset."
Any meaningful restrictions on emissions would make energy costs rise, he said.