Today, Explained - Kill me maybe

Episode Date: August 24, 2018

The EPA is rolling back Obama-era regulations on coal-fired plants. It says its decision will kill 1400 Americans per year by 2030. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You like to listen to podcasts, but how about audiobooks? Google Play has audiobooks, over a thousand titles to choose from. And right now, when you sign in with your Google account at g.co slash play slash explained, you can get $10 off your first audiobook purchase. Mayor Irfan, you report on the environment for Vox. It's been a wild week of news and easy to miss in all of it is that the EPA rolled back regulations on coal. I don't want to sleep on that. Yeah, you definitely shouldn't because it could kill you. Wait, that sounds a little dramatic.

Who says it could kill me? Well, the Environmental Protection Agency's own regulatory impact analysis of this new rule says that it will kill 1,400 additional people by 2030. That isn't like per year, right? Like by 2030, it'll kill 1,000. No, no, it's an annual rate. What? Yeah, it's, it's, these are called premature deaths. So basically, you know, it's not like somebody's cause of death or death certificate is going to read killed by a coal power plant, but people who are experiencing heart attacks that they otherwise would not have had or emphysema or any other kinds of asthma and other kinds of diseases, those are going to be exacerbated. And those will add up to a tally of about 1,400 per year by 2030 on the current trends that we're seeing right now.

Holy shit. So why is this happening? Where do we start? Well, this week, the Environmental Protection Agency's acting administrator, Andrew Wheeler, announced a new proposal that would supplant President Obama's signature climate change policy. And that is the Clean Power Plan. A plan two years in the making, and the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change. I thought Obama's signature climate move was the Paris Accord. The Paris Accord definitely took center stage when it came to climate policy. It was a big international agreement.

All the countries in the world got together in Paris to sign it. Lots of famous people were there. Leonardo DiCaprio, actor, productor. Be bold, be courageous. Do everything in your power to change our current course. After all, the entire world is watching you. The Paris Accord was definitely the big high profile, you could say stunt, because it was non-binding and every country set their own targets.

Totally voluntary. It was totally voluntary, yeah. The big deal in Paris, though, was that we got every country in the world to agree that climate change is a problem and that every country in the world has to contribute toward the solution. And Obama's solution was the Clean Power Plan. The Clean Power Plan was the tentpole of the U.S. solution to the solution. And Obama's solution was the Clean Power Plan. The Clean Power Plan was the tentpole of the U.S. solution to the problem. It was going after one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the United States. So the Clean Power Plan is Obama's way of adding some real tangible policy to this sort of symbolic agreement in Paris. What exactly did it do?

Well, the Clean Power Plan set standards for states to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. And the goal was to reduce power sector emissions in the United States by about a third by 2030. Each state had basically their own target that was kind of tailored to them. But it gave the states a lot of flexibility in how to meet that target. And that was the Obama administration's pitch that, you know, we want everybody to curb greenhouse gases, but we're going to leave it up to you. You can use carbon capture on your coal-fired power plants. You can replace your coal plants with renewable energy. Or you can become much more efficient and do more with less energy overall, which would reduce your greenhouse gas emissions.

And some states said that that still wasn't enough. Twenty-four states sued the government saying that the EPA overstepped its bounds, that what they're doing is not constitutional and that this would harm or jeopardize their economies in an unacceptable way. And there was a mix of how we'd get there. So the states with the most polluting energy, for example, might have to do a lot more than a state that was mostly green. Right. That's exactly what a lot of the states were arguing. States in the Pacific Northwest that get a lot of hydropower already have a very green electric grid and they don't have to do much at all to comply.

And so the states that do recline on coal power, they were saying that, you know, you're putting an unfair burden on us. They sued and they tried to block it. Give me some idea who was suing the government then. I mean, states like Texas and West Virginia and Wyoming, you know, big oil, gas, and coal states. But your Californias and your Washingtons and your Vermonts and your Mains, they're all happy about this? Yeah, the big northeastern states and western states. You know, it kind of aligns with people's politics. This is sort of a proxy for a big political fight.

But yeah, a lot of states were in favor of it. And now that the Trump administration is pulling out, some of those states have said that they're going to continue trying to curb their own greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, Jerry Brown, the governor of California, has launched like a major push to essentially tell the rest of the world that California is still in, that California is still going to meet its Paris climate goals. California has a very imaginative and aggressive climate action policy. And that's significant because California is, you know, the fifth largest economy in the world. So we're all in in decarbonizing our economy. Where California goes, they hope the rest of the country will eventually have to follow at some point. Okay, so what about this new policy that the EPA under Andrew Wheeler, who is a former coal lobbyist and President Trump are proposing? The new rule, which the Trump administration is calling the affordable clean energy rule,

essentially lets states set their own benchmarks. It lets them pick their own finish lines and decide what they want to do on their own, which means some states will do very little, if anything, at all. So does that literally mean that, let's say, Texas could say, hey, our clean power standard, zero. They could just wipe it out completely? Pretty much. I mean, according to the EPA's analysis, they say that by 2030, this would reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 0.7% to about 1.5% compared to about 33%, which is what the Obama administration was shooting for.

So the needle would move pretty much only by inertia, just coal plant retirements on their own, nothing really being required of states actively to curb their emissions. So apart from climate change, changing the Clean Power Plan creates this immediate danger, this immediate risk to Americans' lives. Right. Whenever the EPA proposes a change in regulations, it has to do an assessment to show how much it's going to cost and what kind of impact it will have. And when they did that assessment, they found that by 2030, upward of 1,400 extra people will die per year. And how do these people die? Well, it's pollution that exacerbates existing health conditions or underlying problems like emphysema, heart attacks, asthma. And when you talk about people dying, are people

in certain states more at risk than others? Certainly people who are living in and around power plants, people who live in and around mining infrastructure are most at risk. Earlier this year, NPR did a big report and they found that black lung disease is actually on the rise again in Appalachia and mining communities. This is the largest cluster of progressive massive fibrosis ever reported in the scientific literature. So it's something that is a clear risk for health. So is this affordable clean energy proposal going into effect immediately or does someone need to sign off on it? Well, as the name suggests, proposal means it's out there right now for comments. There is a 60-day public comment period and then it's going to enter the rulemaking process. But it's not finalized yet. And like the Obama administration rule, it's very

likely that states will step up and sue the EPA and say that this rule is inadequate and does not do enough to protect the environment or health. How might that go? Well, lawsuits can drag on for years. And like I said before, there were 24 states that sued the administration right away over the Clean Power Plan. And then more states signed on. Well, it looks like a heated battle is erupting between the Environmental Protection Agency and the Supreme Court. Which ruled Tuesday, February 9th, that the president's Clean Power Plan could not go forward until all legal challenges were resolved. Now it's very likely that states are going to get mad at this new affordable clean energy proposal and basically sue it from the other side. Those lawsuits are going to fight their way through the courts for years and they may stall this from

going into effect. So is this kind of like repeal and replace 2.0 but with coal standards instead of health care? The thing is it's not like the Obamacare repeal fight because there, the Trump administration talked about repeal and replace. But if they don't replace it, they're still okay legally. There's no law saying that they have to come up with a healthcare law. With a clean power plan though, there is a law. The Supreme Court had ruled that the EPA has to regulate greenhouse gases. And the Obama administration said, well, the clean power plan is the way we're going to do that. So if they repeal that by law, they have to come up with a replacement or they have to find a serious flaw with the way the Obama era rule was put together.

Is anyone making the argument that this new plan does, I don't know, at least the same job or a better job than the old plan? This new plan that says your standards can be set close to zero? Well, that's what the current Trump administration is saying. They say that the current proposal fits within the EPA's mandate. It's legally sound because they're less likely to get sued by states. And they're also changing the cost-benefit analysis. This is something that the EPA is doing kind of across the board. Basically, the way they measure environmental harm, they're minimizing that.

But in terms of the cost to industry, they're weighing that much more heavily to show that putting a rule like this into effect is going to be a lot more costly for the economy as a whole. Coming up, it's 2018. We know coal is bad for the environment. It's bad for humans. Why is the president trying to up the country's coal game? This is Today Explained. I'll see you next time. $10 off your first audiobook purchase at Google Play when you go to g.co slash play slash explained

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My administration is putting an end to the war on coal. Going to have clean coal, really clean coal. So this new affordable clean energy proposal is all part of how President Trump wants to stop what he likes to call the war on coal. Is there a war on coal? There isn't a war on coal, but the Trump administration certainly likes to act like it. You can start back in the 2015 and 2016 campaign for president when candidate Trump was talking about his love of coal. We will end the war on coal. And his hatred of windmills. The wind kills all your birds. All your birds killed. You know,

the environmentalists never talk about that. And I wouldn all your birds. All your birds killed. You know, the environmentalists never talk about that. And I wouldn't exactly say it makes your farmlands look beautiful. You got all these windmills all over the place going, driving you loco when you look at them, right? The Trump administration is now launching a full-fledged counter-offensive. So across all the federal agencies, they're pushing policies that will incentivize the coal industry. So at the Department of the Interior, they're pushing policies that will incentivize the coal industry. So at the Department of the Interior, they're opening up more lands to mining and drilling. The Energy Department has been trying to pass this bailout for coal using a provision of the Federal Power Act.

That's essentially a provision that's there to help the U.S. during wartime and essentially saying that we're facing a very critical risk of losing valuable energy infrastructure and therefore the federal government must step in to bail out coal plants and some nuclear plants that are losing money. This war on coal idea is super misleading, but is the coal industry like actually crumbling? Coal has been declining for a very long time. In the 1920s, we had about 800,000 people working in the coal industry, and it's been dropping ever since. Now we're at about 50,000 to 70,000 workers total in the entire coal industry in the United States.

That's fewer than the number of people that work at Arby's. They have the meats. They do have the meats. We have the meats. There are about 350,000 people that work at Arby's. They have the meats. They do have the meats. We have the meats. There are about 350,000 people that work in nail salons in the country, over 3 million nurses. Imagine if those industries had the same political cachet as coal does, or we talked about nursing the way we talk about coal.

And you get a sense of the disproportionality here. What are the reasons that coal has been declining as an industry so gravely? Well, the United States still gets about a third of its energy from coal, but the coal industry has kind of been a victim of its own success. It has gotten a lot more automated, a lot more efficient. Then, of course, in recent years, they've also faced more and more competition from other sources. Natural gas, nuclear, and increasingly renewables. Has the government stymied the coal industry?

Not really. Coal's big enemy, insofar as it has one, has been natural gas. The U.S. has seen a huge boom in natural gas production throughout the country. Natural gas produces about half the greenhouse gas emissions of coal for a given amount of energy that it produces and then it also doesn't have problems of particulates like soot and sulfur compounds and mercury it burns a lot more cleanly so you need a lot less controls on your plant for coal to compete i mean they have to come down very, very drastically in price. And even some of the most efficient current generation coal plants, they have a hard time competing. A lot of utilities throughout the country are telling coal plants, sorry, we found

a cheaper supplier. So where does that leave coal? Well, coal is losing market share. Since 2010, there have been more than 200 coal plants that have closed. And just this year, there are 40 that have announced closures or retirement plans. So we're losing a lot of coal plants that have closed. And just this year, there are 40 that have announced closures or retirement plans. So we're losing a lot of coal plants already just through attrition, just to the fact that they're very old and they can't compete. So is coal just sort of faded to die a natural death at some point? Yeah, there's an inherent decline going on. And so with the affordable clean energy proposal that the EPA put out, they're still estimating that we're going to lose coal capacity by about 20% by 2030. And this current proposal, effectively, all it's going to do is keep some of the oldest, dirtiest plants on line just a little bit longer. It's not going to do much to move the needle. It's not really

going to change the fate of the coal industry. It feels like so much of the country is thinking about energy alternatives and new ways to produce energy with less emissions and less greenhouse gases. And the president is out there touting coal all the time and talking about a war on coal that applies to an industry that has fewer people working for it than Arby's. Like, why is he doing that? Cole has a lot of symbolic importance in political discussions, and it's certainly a big component of his identity politics, basically an appeal to his base. By advocating Cole, he is throwing a bone to some of his strongest, most ardent supporters while also sticking it to the liberals.

The people who made their bones in mining, extracting and burning coal, they're still around and they still have a lot of money and they're definitely spending it. People like Bob Murray of Murray Energy has very close ties to the president himself and across all the agencies. And so he's definitely leveraging that for policies that favor coal even if many of the miners at the lower levels are willing to transition to other kinds of work. Coal, like the Trump administration's appeal, is sort of a relic of a bygone era. It's hearkening back to a time when these industries and these people were in power and they were valued. And now they're being pushed out of the mainstream by forces beyond their control. And while the Trump administration is aggressively trying to resurrect that past,

those forces are continuing to act and it's very unlikely that they'll be able to move the needle. Umair Irfan reports on the environment at Vox. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. This is Today Explained. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Bridget McCarthy is our editor.

Noam Hassenfeld and Luke Vander Ploeg produced the show. Afim Shapiro is our engineer. Our summer interns are Bree Seeley and Catherine Wheeler. And the sustainable Breakmaster Cylinder makes music for us. Today Explained is on Twitter, thanks to the unyielding efforts of Julie Bogan. She shares all sorts of behind-the-scenes stuff, further reading, her GIF game is on point.

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