White House clears GHG proposals

The White House yesterday finished its review of two draft regulations that are part of the suite of climate regulations expected to soon be proposed by EPA.

The Office of Management and Budget has cleared the agency's greenhouse gas "tailoring" rule, as well as its reconsideration of a George W. Bush administration policy on regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants.

The "tailoring rule" is expected to limit strict permitting requirements to industrial sources of more than 25,000 tons a year of carbon dioxide equivalent.

The White House also cleared a proposal that is expected to detail the Obama administration's reconsideration of the "Johnson memo," a document issued by former EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson asserting that the government should not regulate carbon dioxide emissions from new coal-fired power plants.

EPA has not yet released the text of the proposals.

Reprinted from Greenwire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500

2 Comments

1. 1. Doug.Houseman 02:02 PM 9/23/09

   If the EPA wanted to do something with a large short term impact on CO2 - they would review the New Source Rules and allow power plants to improve their efficiency. The New Source Rules were put in place to get plants to install the newest anti-pollution equipment for NOx, Mercury, SOx and other pollutants. At the time they were badly needed. But the result has been many power plants went through installing this gear and the newest gear is now very expensive and marginally better. The CO2 result is we are running power plants that could be 10 to 30 percent more efficient than they are because they owners can not justify ripping out existing anti-pollution gear and replacing it with marginally better gear. setting thresholds for other pollution reduction (say 10% improvement over the installed equipment) to make changes that would increase the power produced from the fossil fuel burned with no increase in CO2 from the plant - the net result would be less CO2 produced per MWH of electricity. The EPA needs to not compromise the original goals of new source review, but they should revisit them in light of climate change.

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