E&E News By Jean Chemnick, Hannah Northey, Sean Reilly | 01/24/2022
EPA is preparing to Supreme Court-proof President Biden’s ambitions for a carbon-free power grid by looking beyond direct greenhouse gas regulation and relying on the knock-on effect of stricter air, waste and water rules.
It’s a “comprehensive approach” to decarbonize the power grid that’s been in the works since the beginning of the Biden administration (Climatewire, Oct. 27, 2021).
But now that the Supreme Court has agreed to take up a case that could limit how EPA regulates carbon from the power sector, it has become even more important for the agency to find alternative ways to show it can deliver on the president’s promise of a power grid that is 80 percent clean by the end of this decade — and carbon neutral five years later.
The solution EPA is preparing to offer in the coming weeks is a sectorwide road map of the greenhouse gas, conventional air pollutant and water rules it plans to promulgate in the next few years. The strategy could push the ball forward on Biden’s climate commitments by making it less economic to run coal-fired power plants in this country.
“It’s just a question of how hard EPA feels like squeezing, or legally how hard it can squeeze and politically how hard it can squeeze,” said David Bookbinder, chief counsel for the Niskanen Center, a Washington-based think tank. “Coal plants could find themselves even in a steeper slide than they are now.”
EPA began floating the idea of a power sector “initiative” or “strategy” in private discussions last year before international climate talks began in Glasgow, Scotland. And acting EPA air chief Joe Goffman previewed the approach in public comments, as well as in the EPA chapter of the influential Climate 21 Project transition-period memo he co-wrote with Brenda Mallory, who became Biden’s White House Council on Environmental Quality chair, and Jennifer Macedonia, who is now also a senior EPA official.
“Where regulation is justified to address critical environmental damage caused by coal production and combustion, regulation can create climate co-benefits by rectifying the economics of fossil-based generation and competition with clean energy sources,” the chapter states.
Goffman, who played a leading role in carbon regulation under President Obama and now leads the EPA team that will write climate and air pollutant rules, said last year that EPA Administrator Michael Regan had asked the agency to “think broadly across the different pollutants in the different media that are affected by the power sector” when charting a course on power plant carbon.
More:
https://www.eenews.net/articles/how-biden-could-close-coal-plants-without-co2-regulations/
