Obama & The Anti-Science Of EPA's War On Coal

. . . The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public. To the extent permitted by law, there should be transparency in the preparation, identification, and use of scientific and technological information in policymaking. . . .

President Barack Obama, Memorandum, Subject: Scientific Integrity, 9 March 2009

Ah, remember those idealistic days of 2009, when our Moralizer In Chief Barack Obama promised to "restore" scientific integrity to our government. Well, those days are long gone.

Obama is using the EPA to conduct a war on coal, promoting new guidelines under the Clean Air Act that will stop the creation of any new coal fired power plants and force the shut down of many existing plants as they reach a point of needing to upgrade. Since coal is the primary source for our nation's electricity needs, this will end up costing our nation dearly - with the poor and middle class being the hardest hit.

The justification for these new guidelines is that they will save lives. The EPA is basing this assertion on two longitudinal, observational scientific studies, the Harvard Six Cities Study (HSCS) and the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Prevention Study II (CPS II):

Both studies showed that exposure to fine particle air pollution (that is, particles with a diameter of less than 2.5 microns, or PM2.5) was linked with increased mortality. Their results provide the basis for most EPA regulations targeting air quality because, the EPA claims, such regulations will save a large numbers of lives.

There are some real questions about the reliability of the conclusions reached by the researchers. For Instance:

The association of PM2.5 with mortality shows geographic heterogeneity – no such association is seen in the western US, where the climate is dry and PM2.5 make-up differs from that in the eastern US.

Second, the results of the studies have been presented in a way that focuses narrowly on PM2.5 and precludes putting the association in perspective relative to other predictors of mortality, including cigarette smoking, income, and other factors.

Third, reports from these two studies tend to cite only supporting studies and to ignore studies that have not found an association of PM2.5 with mortality."

But here is the kicker. Those two studies are . . . wait for it . . . secret.

What what what?

Yes, the EPA is claiming that the data, meta-data, computations - in short, everything about the "scientific studies" that would allow the studies to be subject to vetting and reproduction (i.e., the scientific method) - are secret and cannot be released.

This is the polar opposite of scientific integrity.

And, believe it or not, it gets worse, the same people who "carried out the studies used by the EPA as the basis for regulation and are also involved in the implementation of EPA policy."

The ostensible reason given for not releasing the information regarding these studies is the claim that to do so would violate third party confidentiality rules:

[I]f third parties are given access to the data, the identity of study participants could become public, in violation of the researchers’ guarantee of confidentiality. The lead researcher on the CPS II study has made this argument. Supporters of the subpoena argue that the dataset could be stripped of personal identifiers.

In fact, the issue of confidentiality appears to be a dodge since large datasets of this type are routinely stripped of personal identifiers to protect subject confidentiality and enable use by researchers.

The EPA should be shut down over this. Republicans have been trying to have the EPA provide this data for over two years. The EPA has steadfastly refused. Republicans have now filed a subpoena to which Democrats have objected - their grounds:

The ranking Democratic member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D – TX) characterized Chairman Smith’s action as an attempt to make the data available to “industry hacks” in order to discredit the research and weaken clean air regulation.

The scientific method - the ability to pour over another's experiment line by line and either prove it or disprove it - is the sina que non of scientific integrity. Rep. Johnson either doesn't seem to know that or otherwise puts it in a back seat to politics. This, from Obama's EPA, is just politicized science at its very worst.

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Who Voted For The End To Coal?

The Obama EPA's war on coal is nearly complete. On Tuesday, the EPA issued it's first proposed rule for green house gases that will effectively prevent any new coal plant from being built, at least beyond the 20 or so in the pipeline today. This from the CS Monitor:

The Obama administration on Tuesday proposed the nation’s first-ever restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from US power plants. If approved, the restrictions are expected to sharply curb construction of new coal-fired power plants nationwide.

The proposed restrictions, unveiled by officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, would apply only to new fossil-fuel-burning power plants – limiting them to no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per megawatt generated.

A typical coal-fired plant produces more than 1,700 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt. Most natural-gas fired plants – the majority of power plants under construction today – emit less than the new standard, around 800 pounds per megawatt.

The Obama EPA's other recently issued rules, the Cross State Air Pollution Rule, Boiler MACT, and Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, all attack existing coal fired power plants. Coal provides nearly 50% of our electrical generating capacity today.

We may be lucky. Obama, when he started the war on coal, sold the fantasy of replacing coal with solar and wind - yet neither are any closer to being cost effective at scale today than they were in 2009. That said, natural gas, which has exploded in recent years, may provide a replacement. Still, the overhead costs of building new LNG plants to replace working coal plants prior to the end of their natural period of operation will be significant. Then there is the question of how much the price of natural gas will rise as demand increases exponentially to replace coal. So whatever happens, electric costs are going to rise, the only questions are by how much and whether we will experience significant disruptions of electric service as part of this top down forced replacement of coal.

All of that said, the question that we should be asking is this, did any of our elected representatives vote into law a bill driving coal from our energy marketplace? No, quite the opposite, when the President's energy plan was presented two years ago, it couldn't make it out of the Senate. So why is it that something so fundamental to our nation is being decided based on regulations made without the approval of our elected representatives and in contravention of Article I, Section I of our Constitution (all legislative power is vested in Congress). This out of control, extra constitutional regulatory bureaucracy is the single greatest systemic problem our nation faces. As I wrote in a prior post, End The Tyranny - No Regulation Without Representation.

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Obama's Energy War

The left's war on energy in America has been ongoing wince the 70's. With Obama, the first truly far left President ruling our nation through the EPA, the Energy Dept. and the Dept. of the Interior, the far left's war on energy has gone into overdrive. Let's address the war on coal first, the effects of which are literally looming just around the bend. Coal accounts for nearly 50% of our electricity, but the Obama administration is just now putting in place new regulations that will begin driving coal from the marketplace.  The costs of electricity will soon be ramping upwards, and the stability of our power grid will become suspect:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has dangerously underestimated the impact of its back-door mandates on affordable coal-based electricity generation. Instead of the 4.8 to 9.5 gigawatts(GW) of electric plant retirements predicted by EPA, 57 power plants with 25.1 GW of generating capacity have already gone on the chopping block due to U-MACT and CSAPR. That means more than 29,000 workers are losing their jobs, millions of consumers will be paying more for their electricity and the reliability of our electricity supply is being compromised.

U-MACT  is the EPA's latest regulation on boilers. CSAPR  is the EPA's recently launched Cross State Air Pollution Rule. Both are a backdoor attack on coal.  Neither has or will ever be voted upon by Congress under our current wholly bastardized form of government.  As I have said before, there should be  No Regulation Without Representation.

As to the war on oil, Obama claims that drilling in the U.S. to increase supply will have no impact on gas prices. That is ludicrous. We are already feeling the impact of the war on oil through our gas prices - the average price of which under Obama is shown in the chart below:

Increase supply relative to demand and prices fall - that is the law of supply and demand. As to the most important component of the cost of a gallon of gas - roughly 45% - is the cost of a barrel of oil.  According to Obama, we have "only 2%" of the world's oil and drilling would make no difference, we have to cut down on demand.  The cognitive dissonance in that statement is mind numbing.  Obama is invoking the law of supply and demand, but saying that only demand matters, not supply.  Time to go to Krauthammer:

 

As to oil scarcity in the U.S., saying that we have only 2% of the world's oil is so deceptive that it amounts to a stunning lie of omission.  What we are drilling today constitutes 2% of the world's oil. That is a minuscule fraction of what is actually in the ground in the U.S. and recoverable if Obama would allow it.

Do note that those figures come from the Dept. of Energy.  As Hot Air points out, the above pyramid includes:

• At least 86 billion barrels of oil in the Outer Continental Shelf yet to be discovered
• About 24 billion barrels in shale deposits in the lower 48 states, according to EIA.
• Up to 2 billion barrels of oil in shale deposits in Alaska’s North Slope
• Up to 12 billion barrels in ANWR, according to the USGS.
• As much as 19 billion barrels in the Utah tar sands
• A stunning 1.4 trillion barrels of oil shale the massive Green River Formation in Wyoming

The reality is that the Obama administration is doing all it can to depress oil production.  During the three years of the Obama administration, recovery of oil on federal lands has decreased by between 7% and 10% - and its been even worse for natural gas.  Again to Krauthammer:

President Obama incessantly claims energy open-mindedness, insisting that his policy is “all of the above.” Except, of course, for drilling:

●off the Mid-Atlantic coast (as Virginia, for example, wants);

●off the Florida Gulf Coast (instead, the Castro brothers will drill near there);

●in the broader Gulf of Mexico (where drilling in 2012 is expected to drop 30 percent below pre-moratorium forecasts);

●in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (more than half the size of England, the drilling footprint being the size of Dulles International Airport);

●on federal lands in the Rockies (where leases are down 70 percent since Obama took office).

But the event that drove home the extent of Obama’s antipathy to nearby, abundant, available oil was his veto of the Keystone pipeline, after the most extensive environmental vetting of any pipeline in U.S. history. It gave the game away because the case for Keystone is so obvious and overwhelming. Vetoing it gratuitously prolongs our dependence on outside powers, kills thousands of shovel-ready jobs, forfeits a major strategic resource to China, damages relations with our closest ally, and sends billions of oil dollars to Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin and already obscenely wealthy sheiks.

Obama boasts that, on his watch, production is up and imports down. True, but truly deceptive. These increases have occurred in spite of his restrictive policies. They are the result of Clinton- and Bush-era permitting. This has been accompanied by a gold rush of natural gas production resulting from new fracking technology that has nothing at all to do with Obama.

“The American people aren’t stupid,” Obama said (Feb. 23), mocking “Drill, baby, drill.” The “only solution,” he averred in yet another major energy speech last week, is that “we start using less — that lowers the demand, prices come down.” Yet five paragraphs later he claimed that regardless of “how much oil we produce at home . . .that’s not going to set the price of gas worldwide.”

So: Decreasing U.S. demand will lower oil prices, but increasing U.S. supply will not? This is ridiculous. Either both do or neither does. Does Obama read his own speeches?

Obama says of drilling: “That’s not a plan.” Of course it’s a plan. We import nearly half of our oil, thereby exporting enormous amounts of U.S. wealth. Almost 60 percent of our trade deficit — $332 billion out of $560 billion — is shipped overseas to buy crude.

Drill here and you stanch the hemorrhage. You keep those dollars within the U.S. economy, repatriating not just wealth but jobs and denying them to foreign unfriendlies. Drilling is the single most important thing we can do to spur growth at home while strengthening our hand abroad.

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