President Obama's Alleged "War on Coal" - Climate Change Edition | Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren | Cato Institute: Commentary

President Obama's Alleged "War on Coal" - Climate Change Edition | Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren | Cato Institute: Commentary: "The regulation at issue proposes an emissions target of 1,000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour of generation — something impossible for coal-fired power plants to meet without expensive carbon capture technology — but it applies only to brand-spanking-new, non-peaking natural gas power plants and coal-fired power plants that might be built some day in the future. Not to existing power plants. Not to existing power plants that undertake extensive upgrades that might deem them a "new source" for regulatory purposes under the Clean Air Act. And not to peaking gas-fired power generators.

That's the key to understanding this regulation because — as the EPA points out (and as CEOs in the utility sector confirm) — there are no new coal-fired power plants in the pipeline that this rule might cover and no prospect of the same unless natural gas prices hit at least $9.60 per million BTU (in 2007 dollars) on a sustained basis. Moreover, almost all of the gas-fired power plants that will be built will meet these standards without any additional costs.

Hence the regulation will impose negligible costs and, as the EPA itself confesses, negligible benefits."

"They could have gone after existing coal-fired generation, but didn't. They could have gone after coal-fired power plants that upgraded into "new source" status, but didn't. They could have imposed steep requirements on old and/or new gas-fired generators, but didn't. They essentially ... did nothing: And this from an administration that had long argued that political opponents better come to the negotiating table and sign-on to a cap-and-trade bill lest the administration grow tired of talk and ram something through unilaterally."