EPA's new carbon rules: The beginning of the end for the coal industry?

On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency presented a new draft of carbon rules that will limit the amount of carbon dioxide new power plants will be allowed to emit. Big coal claims the new carbon rules will effectively "ban" new power plants.

“The president’s Climate Action Plan calls on federal agencies to take steady, sensible, and pragmatic steps to cut the harmful carbon pollution that fuels our changing climate, to prepare our communities for its unavoidable impacts, while continuing to provide affordable and reliable energy for all,” Gina McCarthy, an administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, said in a speech outlining the new carbon rules.

Specifically, the rules block future coal burning power plants from emitting more than 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour — a limit that requires the plants to use carbon capture and storage technologies that suck carbon dioxide out of smokestacks and inject it deep under ground. Carbon dioxide is the world's leading greenhouse gas, and is considered a leading cause of global warming.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Opponents of the carbon rules say requiring that technology will lead to the end of the coal industry. The technology is "so prohibitively expensive in terms of capital costs that no investor would dream of taking the risk," says Christopher Helman in Forbes.

Opponents also say the efficacy of the technology hasn't properly been demonstrated. "EPA has set a dangerous and far-reaching precedent for the broader economy by failing to base environmental standards on reliable technology," Hall Quinn, president and CEO of the National Mining Association said in The Wall Street Journal.

Others say the coal industry is crying wolf. Brad Weiners at Bloomberg Businessweek points out that the carbon rules will only apply to new plants and those currently under construction. "This isn’t about policing the dirtiest of the dirty. It’s about closing a gate behind the dinosaurs," he says.

"When new mercury emissions limits were imposed in the spring, there were similar doomsday declarations," he writes. "The lights will go out! Rates will soar! Obama is coming for your light bulbs! Nothing of the sort has happened."

And it probably won't this time either, say supporters. The New York Times:

“These rules are reasonable,” Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass) said in the Times. “They are feasible. And they should soon be expanded to include standards for existing power plants.”

The irony of it all: At the end of the day, whether or not the EPA's new set of carbon rules will "ban" new coal plants might be a moot point. The U.S.'s booming natural gas industry is doing a lot more to regulate coal than the EPA possibly could. Brad Plumer explains this on The Washington Post's Wonkblog: