Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
11/21/2014
The Environmental Protection Agency will not adjust their carbon emissions regulation for existing coal-fired power plants to meet the level of emissions reduction agreed to in the recent climate deal struck between the United States and China, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said at a breakfast hosted this week by the Christian Science Monitor. Under the agreement, the United States has committed to reducing net greenhouse gas emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 and China has committed to setting targets to peak CO2 emissions by 2030 and to increase non-fossil fuel energy production to 20 percent of their energy mix by 2030. “We are not going to measure ourselves by those goal posts. Those goal posts were set by a variety of actions, not just this one, and every rule has to stand on its own and be done the way it is supposed to be done,” McCarthy said. The regulations, which set state specific goals for carbon emissions reductions and require states to develop action plans to meet those goals, would result in nationwide reductions of 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
The ‘Clean Power Plan’ was developed under section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act and is separate from the U.S., China agreement, McCarthy said. While it will contribute to meeting the goals agreed upon by the U.S. and China, it will not be tailored to those goals. “We’re implementing the individual rules and efforts under the Climate Action Plan including the Clean Power Plan, in a way that is consistent with the underlying rules, the way we would always do it, to try to achieve what is aggressive, that is intended under the statute, and to meet our mission, but also to do it in a way that is as smart as we could. Meaning in the case of the Clean Power Plan, it’s going to be legally sound,” McCarthy said. “So we are doing it in a consistent way in each and every rule, not in a way where were going to let what our end goal is on climate intervene in a way that is inappropriate. We are not shooting for outside targets. We are shooting for the target that we are supposed to, under implementation of the current rules.”
The Clean Power Plan will contribute to efforts to reach the goals laid out in the agreement with China, but is not a “silver bullet,” McCarthy said. The goals in the agreement that were developed looked at several actions that could be taken as opposed to relying on just one. “The White House and the interagency effort has been looking at what is reasonable to achieve under a variety of the efforts in the Climate Action Plan. They are also taking a look at what other rules and voluntary efforts might be appropriate to consider in this timeframe and they’re all also sort of taking a look at what other things we didn’t think about … No one rule is going to be the linchpin here, It is going to have to be a combination of efforts between government, the business sector, states, local communities and others who need to step up to the plate and contribute to this,” she said.
Final Proposal Will Change, Independently of China Agreement
The proposed regulations have received over 1.5 million comments thus far, with a comment deadline of Dec. 1. Those comments will be addressed in the final rule, which will differ from the proposal, McCarthy said. “I also think that we have shown this industry, the utilities and the states, that EPA does listen to comments. We actually do change from proposal to final on the basis of what we hear in comments,” she said. “We are not going to craft a final rule that is trying to achieve a certain level or a certain timing that is dictated by the climate goal that was recently released by the president. It will be dictated by what we have seen in the data, what the comments have said, what is the most reasonable and achievable but aggressive goal we can move towards here.”
