liberalism + Socialism = Terrorism
The Patriot Conservative News Tea Party Network
Thanks for your Support
© All copyrights reserved By Patcnews
liberalism + Socialism = Terrorism
Largest coal producing state slams administration over EPA rules
Fox News
The American coal industry is accusing the Obama administration
of using the Environmental Protection Agency to end the use of coal
despite the president's claim of having an "all of the above" energy
policy.
Earlier this year, the EPA issued its Mercury Air Toxics Standards
(MATS), which the agency said will eliminate 90 percent of mercury and
acid gas released into the air by coal-fired power plants.
"I would say this administration is certainly unfriendly towards
coal," Wyo. Governor Matt Mead said. "And in my view it is a war on
coal."
Mead proudly pointed out that Wyoming is currently the nation's
largest coal producing state. "We export more coal than any other state
by far...about 400 million tons per year. Wyoming coal produces a lot of
electricity in this country," he said.
He and others in the coal industry are concerned, however, that the
EPA's MATS rules, which go into effect in January 2016, will devastate
coal production in America and force many older power plants to close
because the cost of retrofitting them will be too high.
Combined with other EPA policies and regulations, Betsy Monseu, CEO
of the American Coal Council said, "Starting in about 2012 and
continuing to 2020, we'll have about 60 gigawatts of coal-fired
generation coming off-line...and the majority of that will come off in
regard to the implementation of MATS in 2015 and 2016."
One of Monseu’s issues is the way she said the administration is
targeting coal, which currently fuels around 40 percent of the
electricity produced in the U.S. "Increasingly we face a situation where
policy is dictated not by Congressional mandate but rather by executive
order and regulatory mandate from the EPA," she said.
The EPA declined an interview request but said in a statement to Fox
News, "The reality is that some older coal-burning power plants are
being phased out due to business decisions to move away from investing
in aging facilities, many of which are more than 50 years old, do not
control pollution, and are almost never run anywhere near full capacity.
Other factors, like low natural gas prices relative to other fuels and
slow growth in demand for electricity also contribute to these
market-driven business decisions."
R.J. Harrington, executive director of the Boulder, Colo.-based Clean
Energy Action, believes coal was crucial to American industrialization
but is now doing more harm than good.
"Those resources need to stay in the ground because if we need to
continue to extract and burn them we're going to continue to exacerbate
the problems of climate change," he said.
Harrington said replacing the use of coal in America's power
infrastructure will not be easy,but must be done. "We want to discuss a
measured buyout of these resources, and a measured transfer to the
promise of renewable energy, distributed generation, and even larger
utility scale solar and wind."
"We need all energy," countered Mead, "whether it's renewable,
whether it's coal, oil, or gas, and we all have a responsibility to do
it in the best way possible."
"One of the keys to America's success is to have an energy strategy
that does in fact have 'all of the above' and recognizes no energy
source is perfect,” Mead said. “All of them need improvement. Let's
focus our efforts on improving rather than by regulation taking energy
sources off the table."
Recent federal court rulings have sided with the EPA. On April 15, a
three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
upheld the EPA's MATS rule. Two weeks later, the U.S. Supreme Court
upheld another EPA rule that places limits on the amount of smog from
coal plants that can cross state lines.
LLC 501C- 4 UCC 1-308.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE
Content and Programming Copyright 2014 By Patcnews The Patriot Conservative News Tea Party Network © LLC UCC 1-308.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE All copyrights reserved By Patcnews The Patriot Conservative News Tea Party Network Copyright 2014 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of CQ-Roll Call. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content. © All Copyrights reserved By Patcnews The Patriot Conservative News Tea Party Network
No comments:
Post a Comment