Trump's energy policies

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President Donald Trump’s plan to save coal-fired power plants from retirement could cause enough premature deaths from harmful power plant emissions to offset the potential economic benefits of keeping the plants open. This is according to a new study from Resources for the Future (RFF), a prominent energy and environmental research organization. 

The study published Thursday shows that the Trump plan to bail out coal and nuclear power plants — leaked to the news media in late May — would cause between 353 and 815 of additional premature deaths in 2019 and 2020 from increased sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions — the most common and hazardous air pollutants that come from burning coal. The negative economic impact of these health and environmental effects would be in the billions of dollars..

Researchers find Trump’s plan to save coal plants would boost premature deaths – ThinkProgress

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Big dilemas coming up..

The US electricity system is at an extremely sensitive and uncertain juncture. More and more indicators point toward a future in which wind and solar power play a large role. But that future is not locked in. It still depends in large part on policies and economics that, while moving in the right direction, aren’t there yet. And so the people who manage US electricity markets and infrastructure, who must make decisions with 20-, 30-, even 50-year consequences, are stuck making high-stakes bets in a haze of uncertainty.

That uncertainty has increased markedly under the recent Republican administration (somewhat ironically, given its oft-stated goal of “regulatory certainty”). Under President Obama, the feds established a consistent cross-agency push toward clean energy. The long-term trajectory was clear. Now it’s been thrown into doubt. President Trump has embraced fossil fuels, and the owners of struggling coal plants are appealing to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for bailouts..

Solar and wind power are growing. Grid managers need to get ready. - Vox

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Trump digs coal, huh?

About one in five coalminers in Kentucky will get black lung disease, which is deadly and little can be done about it. The reasons for this resurgence are simple: mechanization and the speed up of production have exposed miners to much more and finer dust which is the cause of the disease.

But there is a ploy to limit the mining companies liability, with the help of right-wingers, of course:

Kentucky is at the center of what experts are calling the worst black lung epidemic on record. But instead of making it easier for miners to get access to health care, Kentucky’s lawmakers passed a law that may soon hinder miners’ ability to obtain workers’ compensation benefits. The new law, which goes into effect on July 14, bars federally certified radiologists from assessing coal miners’ X-rays in state black lung workers’ compensation claims. Instead, the state will require that only pulmonologists, physicians whose focus is lung disease, be allowed to judge X-rays for benefit claims. Right now, there are only 11 doctors in Kentucky who are certified to examine X-rays for state benefits claims, and the new law will cut that number down to five.

“It doesn't make any sense from a medical perspective,” Centers for Disease Control epidemiologist and black lung expert Scott Laney told VICE News in an interview at the agency’s Morgantown, West Virginia, offices. The law could restrict coal miners’ access to care, he said. “Certainly it's going to restrict their access to disability compensation proceedings.” Moreover, of the five pulmonologists who will still be allowed to examine X-rays when state claims are filed, three have acted as expert witnesses on behalf of coal companies or their insurers as they sought to challenge miners’ benefit claims, as was reported by NPR in March. Because of this, many black lung experts and advocates say the law is an attempt by the coal industry to limit the amount of money they have to spend on coal miner healthcare in the midst of a mounting epidemic.

“I mean, it's anti-science, is what it is. It's absurd,” says Wes Addington, a lawyer at the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center who represents miners who make federal benefits claims. The CDC’s Laney agreed, explaining that there’s no evidence to suggest that a radiologist would be less qualified to diagnose black lung for a state benefit claim, compared with a pulmonologist. Federally certified radiologists may, in fact, be more qualified than pulmonologists in this matter because looking at X-rays is their specialty, he said.

Coal miners are dying of black lung, and a Kentucky law could make it harder to claim benefits – VICE News

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The EPA and NHTSA are arguing that fuel economy standards would adversely affect American safety. Specifically, the NHTSA claims that halting fuel economy improvements would "reduce highway fatalities by 12,700 lives (over the lifetimes of vehicles through MY [Model Year] 2029)." The crux of the argument suggests that stricter fuel economy standards will require car companies to spend more to make these new cars. That spending will be passed on to consumers, and consumers will have to choose whether to buy a new car or not. The EPA says that fuel economy standards would increase the cost of a new vehicle by $2,340.

The administration then points to a 2018 study from the NHTSA saying that new cars are safer, resulting in fewer deaths and injuries compared to older vehicle models. Therefore, the EPA argues, the US government should not make cars more expensive, because then people will buy fewer new cars, and the US public will incur more fatalities and injuries than they would otherwise. In a phone call with Ars, John DeCicco, a research professor at the University of Michigan Energy Institute, explained that there are problems with this line of logic. DeCicco says that thus far, researchers have not been able to show "a statistically rigorous association between traffic fatalities and fuel economy." "To establish a statistical relationship you have to show it beyond a reasonable doubt that higher fuel economy impacts safety," and in the absence of hard data, the EPA has had to "contrive these things through modeling," DeCicco said.

Additionally, he says, the US has regulated fuel economy for decades. Every new regulation has been costly, and yet fuel economy standards have not been shown to affect safety. DeCicco also added that he was skeptical of the claim that implementing fuel economy standards would be passed on to the consumer directly. "This is kind of an Econ 101 thing, that price is not the same as cost," DeCicco said. Fuel economy standards are "almost always a cost that [automakers] can't pass on to the consumer, that's the nature of the regulation." That is, if customers are willing to pay more for a vehicle, automakers will make their vehicles more expensive to capture more of that profit. If customers won't pay more for a vehicle, automakers will have to cut costs elsewhere to be able to price their cars at a reasonable level.

Fuel economy standards kill people, Trump administration claims | Ars Technica

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Last December, a London-based energy company secured drilling rights to 67,000 acres in Montana for the paltry sum of $1.50 per acre – a steal compared to the $100 per acre average price tag for land leased under the final four years of the Obama administration, according to The New York Times. This wasn’t some end-of-the-year clearance sale. While you might think public lands would be more safeguarded than most from oil and gas development, the Trump administration has actually made it dangerously affordable to lease drilling rights. That’s especially concerning in light of a new federal report that found drilling on public lands accounts for nearly a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

How Did Public Land Drilling Rights Become Cheaper Than a Cup of Coffee? | naked capitalism

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As President Donald Trump prepares his to release his fiscal year 2020 budget request, he is expected to propose massive cuts to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) renewable energy and energy efficiency budget. This attempt comes despite similar requests being roundly rebuked by Congress in the past two years, and the fact that clean energy remains extremely popular among Republican lawmakers and voters.

“The United States is at the forefront of clean-energy efforts,” Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) wrote Friday in the Washington Post. “We are committed to adopting reasonable policies that maintain that edge, build on and accelerate current efforts, and ensure a robust innovation ecosystem.”

Trump’s proposal will slash the budget for DOE’s Office of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (EERE) from $2.3 billion to $700 million — a roughly 70 percent cut — Bloomberg reported this week, citing a department official familiar with the plan. The full budget request is expected to be released Monday.

Trump to propose massive renewable energy cuts, something Republicans don’t even want – ThinkProgress

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The Trump administration is currently attempting to stop California from setting its own pollution standards for automobiles. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has proposed freezing federal fuel economy standards for 10 years (a measure so extreme that even automakers oppose it), but as things stand, California has a waiver under the Clean Air Act that allows it to opt out of federal standards and implement its own vehicle standards. Other states are also allowed to opt for California’s standards if they so choose, which 12 states and Washington, DC, have done. If Trump sets absurdly lax standards, more states are likely to defect to California’s.

So the EPA has set out to deny the state its waiver. There’s going to be a whole huge legal fight over it. These aren’t just any standards, and this isn’t just any fight. Trump’s EPA is going after California because of the state’s long and, to this administration, dangerous history of dragging the nation forward on clean energy and energy efficiency — precisely by using ambitious performance standards. California boosters often note that the state has become more energy-efficient than the rest of the US, which has helped keep its residents’ energy bills low even as the per-unit cost of energy increases...

Oddly, no one seems to have run the numbers on it, to figure out whether California really is a leader or if it’s just lucky. But now, in a report for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Ralph Cavanagh, Peter Miller, and Charlie Komanoff gathered the official statistics, made the spreadsheet, and dug into the question of whether California really is doing something right. The answer: yes. It is. California is decreasing its energy intensity (energy consumed per unit of GDP) and its carbon intensity (carbon emissions per unit of GDP). In fact, if the rest of the nation had improved as quickly as California has between 1975 and 2016, US greenhouse gases would be almost 25 percent lower, NRDC found. And this improvement in performance has not come at the expense of economic growth. Instead, it’s been a huge factor in the state’s economic boom — over the past 40 years, its population and economy have grown faster than the rest of the US.

How California became far more energy-efficient than the rest of the country - Vox

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I mean, what president would try to weaken emission standards so American-made cars could pollute more, so our kids could breathe dirtier air in the age of climate change, when clean energy systems are becoming the next great global industry and China is focused on dominating it? Seriously, who does that? But that’s the initiative Trump has embarked upon of late — an industrial policy to revive all the dirty industries of the past and to undermine the clean industries of the future. It is a policy initiative that is not only perverse on its face, but that utterly fails to connect so many dots that are right now harming our national security, economy, weather and competition with China.

Opinion | Connect the Dots to See Where Trump’s Taking Us - The New York Times

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Two new analyses from Bloomberg this week make clear just how bad President Donald Trump’s policies are for the domestic electric car market and U.S. workers. In the first report, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) explains that Trump’s plan to roll back Obama-era fuel efficiency and emissions standards for vehicles would eliminate any federal requirement for carmakers to build electric vehicles (EVs). BNEF also explains that the deal Ford, Honda, Volkswagen, and BMW struck with California last week to avoid the full rollback will not undo most of the damage. In the second, BNEF concluded that the rapid price drops in the cost of batteries that have driven the energy storage and EV revolutions this decade will continue for the next decade. In short, while Trump can slow adoption of high-efficiency EVs in the United States, other countries — the E.U. and especially China — will simply keep adopting them so quickly that he cannot stop the global EV revolution.

Trump is trying to kill electric cars but will kill jobs and the climate instead – ThinkProgress