EPA proposed rules for CO2 mitigation
So this week, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a method and a goal for reducing carbon emissions (CO2) from power plants by 30%. And it leaves it to each state to come up with their own method for doing so.
This shouldn’t be so hard once we put our efforts into it. And it’s not a conspiracy by the Obama Administration to destroy the economy. Give yourself a little credit. The U.S. CIA and other autocrats may have worked to disrupt economies so they could get power themselves, but Obama’s already the president and it’s pretty likely he’ll step down when his term runs out in Jan. 2017.
There are indeed those who don’t believe that climate disruption is happening or that man could possibly be responsible for it, but we take out insurance on smaller odds that our house will burn down, we’ll be in a car crash or that we’ll die sooner than later than it’s been asserted by 97% of climate scientists that we need to reduce our carbon emissions or risk even further costs for adapting to the changes that will occur. And it turns out that it won’t destroy the economy to use less energy, have cleaner energy, when the full cost of climate disruption is taken into account. What did the cleanup of Katrina or Sandy cost? In any case, the u.S. Supreme Court already ruled that the EPA has a mandate to treat CO2 as a pollutant.
Quoting from their website on the matter “The EPA Clean Power Plan works by setting state goals to reduce the “pollution-to-power ratio” of the covered fossil-fuel fired power plants in a given state. EPA projects that by 2030, when states meet these goals, the U.S. power sector will emit 30 percent less carbon pollution than it did in 2005. But 2005 – or any other year – is not used a “baseline” year for a fixed percentage of reductions. We are using that statistic only because people need to know how much pollution we’ll reduce by when and compared to what, so we’re just comparing where we will be in 2030 to where we were in 2005.”
So, keep your coal fired power plant but somewhere else in your state, there will be either conservation and efficiency measures or renewable energy that will reduce your CO2 to megawatt.
It’s not that hard, if we actually try to work toward the same goal.