It’s been a good year for clean air, and we are grateful. In the last 12 months, the Environmental Protection Agency, under the Obama Administration, has finalized three new clean air standards that will protect Americans from dangerous pollution from power plants and other industrial sources. The administration has also set new fuel efficiency standards for motor vehicles that will nearly double the average fuel economy of new cars and trucks by 2025 and significantly reduce pollution. These standards will save thousands of lives annually, prevent asthma attacks and heart attacks, keep our environment cleaner and allow us all to breathe easier.
In mid-December, the EPA set a stronger standard on soot pollution. Soot is made up of tiny particles of metals and dust — each at least 30 times narrower than a human hair — that can penetrate deep into our lungs and cause significant health problems, particularly for the elderly, children and people with respiratory ailments or heart disease. Soot usually comes from power plants, factories and diesel emissions. Nationally, the number of premature deaths that could be avoided every year from the most protective soot standard is equivalent to the size of a sold-out crowd at Fenway Park, Boston’s historic baseball stadium.
Earlier this year, the EPA set the first standard on global warming pollution from new power plants. Since power plants are the number one source of these emissions, this standard begins to address the kind of pollution that is heating up the planet to dangerous levels and contributing to climate change. Americans showed broad support for this standard, submitting more than 3 million comments to the EPA, the largest number ever collected in support of an EPA clean air protection. It’s no wonder people want the government to act. Hurricane Sandy is a recent and powerful reminder of the growing number of violent weather events, droughts and fires — fueled by climate change — that have devastated people and communities across the country. Now we need to move quickly to complete this part of the process by setting carbon emissions standards for existing power plants as well.
In mid-December last year, the EPA also finalized new standards to reduce mercury, arsenic, dioxin and other toxic emissions from power plants. This standard will reduce mercury emissions by 91 percent, while reducing their terrible health effects for both people and wildlife. This is good news in Maine, where our lakes and fish have high levels of mercury because we are downwind from Midwestern power plants.
Last summer, President Barack Obama and his administration nearly doubled fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks – the second largest source of global warming pollution — to 54.5 miles per gallon. This is the single biggest step the U.S. has ever taken to address climate-changing pollution. Plus, it will save consumers more than $1.7 trillion at the gas pump.
The next opportunity to clean up our air and support cleaner energy is a Congressional vote to extend the production tax credit, a business incentive for clean energy development that has helped to create thousands of jobs across the country, including here in Maine. Unlike coal and other dirty sources of energy, producing renewable energy doesn’t pump carbon or other pollutants into our atmosphere that can drive climate change and harm public health. This vote is due by Dec. 31.
Oil, gas and coal interests and their allies in Congress are doing everything they can to block and roll back these standards and clean energy incentives. While they historically have received generous government subsidies (more than $4 billion in annual tax subsidies), they spent $270 million on TV ads in the two months before the election, to beat back clean air candidates and these new public health standards. But voters rejected these special interest efforts. Poll after poll confirms that the American people count on the EPA to protect them from dangerous air pollution, that they don’t trust polluters to police themselves and that they don’t buy the polluters’ claims that EPA safeguards hurt jobs. Here in Maine we know that a healthy environment and a healthy economy are strongly linked.
Cleaning up air pollution and investing in clean energy will save lives and spur economic growth through innovation and the development of cleaner technologies to modernize power plants and produce cleaner, safer energy. We ask Maine’s senators to help stop these rollbacks and ensure that the EPA can carry forward its Clean Air Act protection programs.
There can be no greater gift to all of us than clean air.
Lisa Pohlmann is executive director of the Natural Resources Council of Maine, and Nancy Cummings is a doctor from Farmington.
“Oil, gas and coal interests and their allies in Congress are doing everything they can to block and roll back these standards and clean energy incentives.” Do not support them then by attacking the small businesses and lesser pollutant categories first. No one cares about your jobs/ bureaucracy’s existence – only the product. The quality of that product so far has been over-inflated full of dressed up theory and consistently rubbish. UNEPs got a greater reach now so, you know maybe more friends if not brains.
Good commentary.
Despite naming CO2 as a pollutant, there is no verifiable record or measurement of it over time….neither DEP or any other govt. agency has measured CO2 over Maine; yet that’s all they can talk about. Point source emissions from smoke stacks are irrelevant to all the other CO2 emitted by cars, etc.
And you wonder why there are a growing number of skeptics who think this is all being made up? Some experts are saying that the reason Maine’s air is so much better is the massive conversion to natural gas and clean burning wood pellet stoves. So be sure there has been a tiny dent from solar thermal heating; but with inexpensive hydro flooding in from Quebec, even electric heating of apts. and offices would be an improvement.
“Here in Maine we know that a healthy environment and a healthy economy are strongly linked.”
So, where’s Maine’s healthy economy? Considering what Maine’s environment and economy were like forty years ago (you didn’t want to be in Rumford on a windless night), I’m not sure ‘what we know’ tracks very well with ‘what is’.
Lisa – NRCM is advocating the rape of Maine’s ridge lands for essentially no benefit to Maine. See the document we already handed to you in person:
http://www.windtaskforce.org/page/nrcm-s-co2-analysis
I guess it fell on deaf ears.
When are you going to get on the side of the truth?
It would be nice if this article was actually based on scientific facts, rather than religious fervor.
For example, wind energy does not replace coal. That pitch may sound good to the choir, but it is simply superstition.
What is real is that a one year extension of the wind PTC will cost $12 Billion, will be money borrowed from places like China, will lead to net job losses due to the higher price of wind electricity, and with zero proof of any net clean air.
For those who have yet to imbibe the Koolaide, see EnergyPresentation.Info.
This article is a naive and politically motivated piece. The good doctor should read Robert Bryce recent article in the WSJ where he describes the theoretical needs of a hospital post “Sandy”:
Assume the hospital needs one megawatt of emergency electricity-generation
capacity. Lives are at stake. It needs power immediately. That capability could
easily be provided by a single, trailer-mounted diesel generator, which would
occupy a small corner of the hospital’s garage (and be safely removed from any flooding
threat). By contrast, providing that much wind-generation capacity would
require about 5.6 million square feet of land-an area of nearly 100 football
fields. And all of that assumes that the land is available, the wind is
blowing, and there are enough transmission lines to carry those wind-generated
electrons from the countryside into Lower Manhattan.
‘Nuff said?
Good that we are putting a dent in much of the pollution that flies here from other parts of the country. But please stop the clatter about the wasteful production tax credit for useless wind power.
wow this is just such distorted lying..I cannot even believe it. The Natural Resource Council of Maine should be completely ashamed of the lies they are spreading while they do not uphold protecting Maine’s resources. I knew this already about them when our group tried to block the awful Oakfield project over two amazing lakes with high bird and bat populations that the State had ranked for preservation and as historic as well. I am beyond disappointed and flabbergasted that they are not protecting our trees, animals birds and the humans that enjoy these resources and hoped to see them preserved for future generations as they were assigned to be before the destructive inefficient expensive wind scam started which requires fossil fuel for back up and dessimates eagles and bats…I agree with John Droz completely..know what you are talking about..you don’t. You want to know how wind helps State economies..watch this..it simply does not ( oh and ask about the wind turbine at UMPI and see its record).
http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/2057224707001/the-cost-of-wind-power/
To conduct further studies into the high cost of electricity produced by wind projects that is absorbed by the ratepayers in the state of Maine. To conduct unbias studies into the efficiency of wind energy compared to other renewable energy sources.
Come on Voohees, get the facts, you NRCM wind shills are pathetic!
New Study Finds Federal Wind Production Tax Credit (PTC) No Longer Needed to Drive Wind Generation Development
Mature Wind Industry Can Compete On Its Own; Taxpayer-funded Welfare-For-Wind Must End
WASHINGTON D.C. – A new report
released today by the American Energy Alliance (AEA) concludes that
wind energy is a mature industry whose growth has rendered the federal
wind Production Tax Credit (PTC) an obsolete government hand-out that
should be allowed to expire.
The AEA-commissioned study, “Removing Big Wind’s Training Wheels: The Case for Ending the Federal Production Tax Credit,” documents
the explosive growth of wind generation as well as the favorable
outlook for future wind generation development as a result of Renewable
Portfolio Standards (RPS) – not the PTC. Conducted by David
Dismukes, associate director and professor at the Louisiana State
University Center for Energy Studies, the study finds that wind
generation now comprises 50,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity capacity
in the United States — a five-fold increase since 2006 — and will
continue to grow even without the renewal of the PTC. The PTC therefore
only serves to tip the scale in favor of a well-established
industry, giving wind an politically-determined advantage over other
types of generation.
Background
The PTC was first enacted in 1992 and currently provides wind producers a subsidy of $22 per megawatt-hour (MWh) of energy generated. It has been extended seven times and is
scheduled to expire under current law on December 31, 2012. Congress
is now debating another extension of the credit. The Joint Committee on
Taxation estimates that a one-year extension would cost taxpayers $12.1
billion.
“When you strip away all the rhetoric, the real issue is that wind is
a mature industry whose growth is being fueled by aggressive RPS
standards and is no longer in need of training wheels,” said Dr.
Dismukes. “The PTC is a costly and inefficient subsidy that is clearly
no longer necessary.”
“The government needs to stop caving to powerful wind lobbyists and
establishing policies that pick winners and losers in the energy
marketplace. The wind PTC has run its course, and taxpayers must no
longer be forced to subsidize a well-established wind industry that
offers no substantive proposal for a phase-out of decades-old energy
welfare,” said AEA President Thomas Pyle.
Findings
The Dismukes study finds that widespread adoption of state RPS
mandates established a substantial guaranteed market for wind; one that
did not exist when the PTC was enacted in 1992. Although a few states
adopted RPS policies as early as the mid to late 1990s, most states
enacted them between 2004 and 2007, which is when a substantial increase
in wind energy capacity development occurred, as documented in the
report. To date, wind generation accounts for 90% of all new renewable
resources developed under these non-federal programs.
Additionally, RPS requirements are expected to grow from about 50,000
MW in 2010 to almost 200,000 MW by 2030, according to the report. If
wind maintains the same 90% market share it holds in today’s renewable
energy generation mix, merely fulfilling future RPS requirements
guarantees wind producers a market for almost 130 GW of additional
capacity through 2030. As such, even post-federal PTC expiration, the
outlook for future wind generation development continues to be
exceptionally favorable.
The report also highlights forecasts from the U.S. Energy Information
Administration which find that even if the PTC and other incentives are
eliminated, renewable generation will still be on track to rise from
500 billion kilowatt hours in 2011 to approximately 750 billion kilowatt
hours by 2035, amounting to a 50% increase in wind generation.
Additional key findings include:
Standards & Poor’s recently estimated as much as $150 billion in
new renewable energy investment opportunities over the next 10 years
even if the PTC is not renewed, driven in large part by opportunities in
wind energy development. Thus, offering billions of dollars in federal
tax subsidies to wind generation, in addition to mandated state
renewable subsidies, allows wind generators to “double dip,” and
reflects a gross waste of limited fiscal resources.
Over 50% of wind capacity is located in only five states; over 75%
is located in just 11 states. The federal PTC, however, unfairly shifts
wind energy development costs from taxpayers in the RPS states to those
with little or no wind development, forcing taxpayers across the country
to support an industry concentrated in only a few states. In fact,
under the PTC, taxpayers in the states without RPS mandates pay
approximately 24% of the PTC funding, even though they receive no direct
benefit.
The “one-size-fits-all” PTC is an inefficient and expensive means of
supporting wind generation that fails to recognize the industry’s
heterogeneity and operational differences, and grossly wastes limited
fiscal resources by over-subsidizing many projects and driving
over-development.
To download a copy of the full report, click here.
NRCM, go on a hike and enjoy the turbine views you are creating, as far as science and economics goes, go back to school please!
Dartmouth is for wimps!
The “one-size-fits-all” PTC is an inefficient and expensive means of
supporting wind generation that fails to recognize the industry’s
heterogeneity and operational differences, and grossly wastes limited
fiscal resources by over-subsidizing many projects and driving
over-development.”
This administration is burdening business with an average of 63 new regulations every day (365/year).
Laud him or loathe him, this is a considerable burden, pure and simple. Thank you, Obamessiah!
This is what happens when people support enviro-mentals at the ballot box (and the newspaper stand).
electricity generation is so small of the whole pollutions. NO PTC……done WIND…you have had 30 years and have gone nowhere. There is an opening for a repairs person at Kibby. A job repairing….mmm…go figure.