A massive trade group for utility companies is reportedly poised to sue the Biden administration over one of its most ambitious climate policies, according to E&E News.
The Edison Electric Institute (EEI) — a trade group that represents all investor-owned utility companies in the U.S. — will soon file a legal challenge against the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recently-finalized regulations for power plants, according to E&E News, which cited four unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter. The trade association did not sue the Obama administration when it promulgated its similar and since-overruled Clean Power Plan, but it is now taking a more confrontational posture to battle the Biden administration’s power plant rules.
The EPA finalized the regulations in question in April; the rules effectively require existing coal-fired plants and new natural gas plants to use costly carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology to control 90% of emissions by 2032 if plant operators want to keep the covered facilities online past 2039, according to the agency. EEI reportedly plans to angle its lawsuit around the EPA’s reliance on CCS to meet emissions reductions targets, according to E&E News. (RELATED: ‘The Swamp Is Getting Deeper’: EPA Awards Billions From Biden’s Landmark Climate Bill To Orgs Loaded With Dem Insiders)
A spokesperson for EEI indicated that a decision about a lawsuit has not yet been made.
“EEI and our member companies continue our efforts to evaluate EPA’s final power plant rules and their impact on electricity customers,” a spokesperson for EEI told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We take all potential litigation decisions seriously and are still considering our options.”
Critics of the EPA’s power plant regulations — a group that includes some Biden administration officials — have pointed out that CCS is not close to ready to play the major role in the U.S. power grid that the agency envisions. Technologically, CCS is still in its early stages and not yet energy efficient, according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development, while other challenges, such as a major permitting backlog, persist.
“While we appreciate and support EPA’s work to develop a clear, continued path for the transition to cleaner resources, we are disappointed that the agency did not address the concerns we raised about carbon capture and storage,” EEI President and CEO Dan Brouillette said of the final regulations when they were made public in late April. “CCS is not yet ready for full-scale, economy-wide deployment, nor is there sufficient time to permit, finance, and build the CCS infrastructure needed for compliance by 2032.”
EEI officials reportedly made the decision to sue on Thursday, but the organization has yet to formally announce that it is taking the federal government to court. More than two dozen Republican state attorneys general have already filed their own lawsuit against the rules.
The administration has hailed the rules as a major step toward decarbonizing the American power grid and wider economy in the coming decades, both of which are key goals of the Biden administration’s sweeping climate agenda. The agency has expressed confidence that the rules will be able to withstand incoming legal challenges and will not impact grid reliability when enacted, but power grid experts previously told the DCNF that the new policies are probably beyond the agency’s statutory authority and also likely to diminish grid reliability in the long-term.
EPA declined to comment, citing its policy of not weighing in on pending litigation.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include comment from EEI.
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The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in January that US domestic production of crude oil for September 2023 set a new all-time high of 13,247,000 barrels per day. That fact probably deserved more notice than it received given that it was the most oil any nation on earth had ever managed to produce in a single month. The high-tech modern US oil and gas industry is completely transformed.
Even more remarkable is the fact that US producers managed to break the record in November, and then exceed the September number again in December, the most current month for which full data is available.
It is likely November’s all-time record of 13,319,000 barrels per day (bpd) has been exceeded at least once again during the first quarter of 2024, as producers find ways to wring more production out of each wellbore.
That ability to increase per-well performance through the application of more effective processes and advancing technologies has been crucial to the ability to raise overall production given that the upward curve has continued even in the face of an active rig count that has dropped by over 25 per cent in the past 15 months. That is a feat the US industry has never achieved in any other period in modern times.
The September 2023 record took place exactly 15 years after American crude production had hit a production nadir not seen since 1943, when the manpower and resource requirements of fighting World War II slowed the business to a crawl. The US churned out just 3,974,000 bpd in September 2008, a level the State of Texas alone exceeded by almost 2 million bpd 15 years later.
Those were the days before the shale revolution kicked off in earnest. Indeed, it was the very next month, October, 2008, when the first successful horizontal oil well was drilled in the Eagle Ford Shale formation in South Texas. Management at the company that drilled that first well, Petrohawk Energy, thought they were drilling for dry natural gas. Imagine their surprise when the light brown sweet oil began flowing up the pipe along with the gas stream.
Two years later, drillers were completing successful horizontal wells in the first of many productive shale formations in the Permian Basin of West Texas. By 2012, production from Texas, which had amounted to just a little more than 1 million bpd in 2008, had risen to 3 million bpd. In November 2023, Texas produced 5,657,000 bpd, and would rank as the 4th biggest producing nation on earth if it were a standalone country.
These numbers are stunning, and they are coming in the face of a President, Joe Biden, and an administration that continues to invoke federal regulations and executive orders designed to impede the industry’s ability to grow. So, other than advancing technology and human ingenuity, how do we account for this ongoing expansion of America’s energy might?
The Biden administration proposed a new regulation Friday that would impose fines on oil and gas companies for methane emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced.
The policy would require companies to pay a penalty of $900 per every ton of methane emitted beyond limits established by the government starting this year, with the cost for each ton above the government’s thresholds increasing to $1,200 in 2025 and jumping to $1,500 in 2026 and beyond, according to the EPA. While the agency touts the proposal as a tool to reduce methane emissions, energy producers have slammed it for adding complexity to the regulatory environment and potentially driving up energy costs for consumers.
“Today’s proposal, when finalized, will support a complementary set of technology standards and historic resources from the Inflation Reduction Act, to incentivize industry innovation and prompt action,” Michael Regan, the EPA’s administrator, said of the proposal. “We are laser-focused on working collectively with companies, states and communities to ensure that America leads in deploying technologies and innovations that aid in the development of a clean energy economy.” (RELATED: Biden Admin Kicks Off 2024 By Unleashing $1 Billion Worth Of New Regulations)
‘Outrageous’: EPA Agents Are Flying Helicopters Over Texas Oil Fields To Crack Down On Methane Emissions From Drillinghttps://t.co/vg5JmFJ7jP
The proposal would become the first direct federal tax on emissions in the U.S. if it is finalized and implemented as planned, according to The New York Times. Congress approved the policy in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s signature climate bill, which also contains $1 billion in grants and subsidies intended to improve methane leak detection.
The EPA estimates that methane drives one third of the warming occurring today and identifies the energy sector as the most significant industrial source of methane emissions in the country, according to its announcement. Environmentalistsmalign natural gas production in particular as a source of methane emissions, but natural gas burns more cleanly in comparison to other fossil fuels, such as coal, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
“As the world looks to U.S. energy producers to provide stability in an increasingly unstable world, this punitive tax increase is a serious misstep that undermines America’s energy advantage,” Dustin Meyer, the senior vice president of Policy, Economics and Regulatory Affairs for the American Petroleum Institute, said of the proposal. “While we support smart federal methane regulation, this proposal creates an incoherent, confusing regulatory regime that will only stifle innovation and undermine our ability to meet rising energy demand.”
The policy is a de facto “natural gas tax” that will almost certainly drive up costs for Americans, Larry Behrens, the communications director for Power The Future, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Shortly after House Speaker Mike Johnson took over as the speaker of the House in October, dozens of Republicans in his caucus wrote to him urging that he endeavor to repeal the enabling statute behind the regulation that the EPA proposed Friday.
“It’s a proposal that follows the direction set by Congress in the Inflation Reduction Act, and we are looking forward to comments and input from industry and the public before finalizing it,” an EPA spokesperson told the DCNF, adding that the “estimated energy cost increases are minimal.”
Friday’s proposal complements a December 2023 EPA proposal for methane detection requirements, which independent oil and gas companies strongly oppose because the increased compliance costs would put them at a disadvantage relative to the major firms.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include a statement from an EPA spokesperson.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
The Department of Energy (DOE) finalized or proposed a bevy of regulatory actions cracking down on numerous appliances on Friday.
The DOE proposed new rules designed to promote “energy efficient” commercial fans and blowers, and also finalized energy efficiency standards for refrigerators and freezers, the agency announced Friday. The regulatory actions are the latest in a string of moves by the Biden administration intended to phase out a host of fossil fuel-powered appliances and replace them on the market with more energy efficient, and often electric, equivalents.
“Today’s announcement is a testament to the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to lowering utility costs for working families, which is helping to simultaneously strengthen energy independence and combat the climate crisis,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said of her agency’s actions. “DOE will continue to move quickly in 2024—together with our industry partners and stakeholders—to update and strengthen outdated energy efficiency standards, which is critical to innovation, more consumer options, and healthier communities.” (RELATED: Biden Admin’s Latest Spending Spree Amounts To A Backdoor Ban On Gas-Powered Appliances, Experts Say)
REPORTER:
"We've seen them go after gas stoves…how many more home appliances will Americans eventually have to replace?" pic.twitter.com/JgjQyiPGK0
Compliance with the finalized fridge and freezer standards will be required starting in either 2029 or 2030, depending on the model and configuration of the equipment, according to the agency. The DOE projects that the rule will cut carbon dioxide emissions by more than 100 million tons.
The proposed set of regulations are modeled on those already in place in California, according to the DOE. The regulations are expected to kick in starting in 2029 and are projected to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 300 million tons.
The Biden administration, led primarily by the DOE, has promulgated numerous regulatory actions that are designed to reduce the use of fossil fuel-powered appliances that tend to be cheaper up front than their more “energy efficient” counterparts. Other appliances the administration has sought to regulate include water heaters, gas-powered portable generators, furnaces and pool pump motors.
Numerous energy policy experts have asserted that the Biden administration’s regulatory blitz on appliances is likely to limit consumer choice and impose higher up-front costs for the sake of fighting climate change. The DOE, on the other hand, estimates that the full suite of energy efficiency regulations will provide approximately $1 trillion in consumer savings over the next 30 years.
The DOE did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pushed several aggressive climate regulations in 2023 that could seriously harm the American economy, energy policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The agency proposed or finalized rules that would spur the electric vehicle (EV) transition, decrease power grid reliability by imposing costly restrictions on power plants, tighten air quality standards and more in 2023. Under the Biden administration, the EPA has made considerable efforts to further regulations that would nominally help to counter climate change, often at the expense of the American economy, energy policy experts told the DCNF.
“The EPA took a disturbing trend to a new level in 2023: a willingness to use its regulatory power to kill off industries, dictate or influence what businesses can operate and limit what goods and services are available to the public,” Daren Bakst, the director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, told the DCNF. “Congress never envisioned the agency’s authorized regulatory power would be used as a tool for the agency to engage in central planning, reshape industries and limit consumer choice.” (RELATED: EPA Bureaucrats Can Rake In Six-Figure Salaries While Mostly Working From Home, Report Finds)
The “Clean Power Plan 2.0″
The EPA’s May proposal to slash greenhouse gas emissions from power plants would require fossil fuel-fired generation facilities to adopt expensive developing technologies, such as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and hydrogen blending, in order to come into compliance over the coming decades. If finalized in its current form, the regulations— which the EPA contends are legal under the auspices of the Clean Air Act— would significantly raise the chances of blackouts in a massive swath of the Midwest while imposing costs to stakeholders totaling nearly $250 billion, according to analysis conducted by the Center of the American Experiment (CAE).
Power the Future, an energy advocacy organization, dubbed the proposal the “Clean Power Plan 2.0” in a November report because of its strong resemblance to the Obama administration’s “Clean Power Plan” proposal, which the Supreme Court struck down in its landmark decision in West Virginia v. EPAin 2022.
The EPA is moving forward with the proposal, despite the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and a key official for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission warning that the premature retirement of fossil fuel-fired baseload generation and increased reliance on intermittent green energy, like wind and solar, threatens future grid reliability.
“The proposed rule does not require that plants go offline,” an EPA spokesperson told the DCNF in August. “The proposed rule would require plants to install proven technology to abate greenhouse gas emissions. The proposal provides owners and operators of power plants with ample lead time and substantial compliance flexibilities, allowing power companies and grid operators to make sound long-term planning and investment decisions, and supporting the power sector’s ability to continue delivering reliable and affordable electricity.”
However, CAE and one of its leading grid experts, Isaac Orr, are not convinced.
The agency “does not appear to have the expertise necessary to enact such a sweeping regulation on the American power sector,” CAE wrote in its August comments in response to the agency’s proposal.
“This is the regulatory equivalent of studying the structural integrity of the top floor of a 100-story building without doing so for the preceding 99 floors,” Orr told the DCNF.
Tailpipe Emissions Standards
In April, the agency unveiled its proposal for new tailpipe emissions standards in an effort to curb emissions attributable to transportation. The proposed standards would be historically stringent if finalized and they would effectively mandate that 67% of all light-duty vehicles sold after model year 2032 are EVs, according to the EPA.
Under the proposed rules, 46% of medium-duty vehicle sales and 25% of heavy-duty sales will be EVs, according to the agency’s projections.
The proposal could be “tremendously damaging for the American people,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate and Environment, told the DCNF. “The reason the agency is pushing these rules is because Congress would never pass these as laws … this rule would be very damaging for Americans and get rid of an iconic means of transportation.”
The administration has spentbillions to facilitate its ambitious EV push, and other agencies, such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, have promulgated their own similar rules as well. Despite these efforts, the American EV market is on tenuous footing: consumer demand is not growing as rapidly as anticipated, companies are losing large sums of money on their EV product lines, auto executives are starting to back away from short-term EV production targets and the nation’s EV charging infrastructure remains inconsistent and unevenly distributed across the country.
Notably, the House passed a bill that would effectively nullify the proposal earlier in December by a bipartisan vote, but it is unlikely to make it through the Senate, and the White House has suggested that President Joe Biden will veto the bill if it lands on his desk, according to The Hill.
Fine Particulate Pollution Standards
In January, the EPA proposed to tighten the existing National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for fine particulate pollution (PM 2.5) in order “to better protect communities, including those most overburdened by pollution,” the agency announced in a press release.
More than 70 industrial executives penned a letter to White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients warning him that it could lead to massive swaths of the nation falling out of compliance with the rule, which would in turn choke economic development and complicate key goals of Biden’s own green industrial agenda, according to its text.
The states that would be most directly impacted by a finalized PM 2.5 NAAQS update would be Texas, California, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and Illinois, according to the letter’s text.
“PM 2.5 is the most demonstrable science fraud going on at the EPA,” Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow for the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, previously told the DCNF. “There is more than enough scientific research to demonstrate that what EPA is doing here is fraud, and it is really a testament to the corruption of the scientific community.”
If finalized, the proposal would kill jobs and put the EPA in a position to deny local economies the right to develop, because states that can not comply with the tightened standards would have to receive approval from the agency to develop new industrial factories and power facilities, Milloy told the DCNF.
The EPA projects that the policy would generate up to $43 billion in net health benefits in 2032, as well as prevent 4,200 premature deaths per year and restore 270,000 lost workdays per year by reducing the current standard of allowable fine particle pollution by up to 25%.
Waters of the United States
In January, the agency proposed a regulation that would define the “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) under the EPA’s regulatory purview as “navigable waters” to include lands containing small streams and wetlands. A federal court blocked the January proposal in April, finding that the 24 states that sued the agency had “persuasively shown that the new 2023 Rule poses a threat to their sovereign rights and amounts to irreparable harm.”
Then, in May, the Supreme Court limited the EPA’s authority under the Clean Water Act — which it had cited as the enabling statute for the January proposal — in its decision in Sackett v. EPA, a case brought by a couple whom the EPA tried to stop from constructing a house on their land in Idaho.
In August, the agency “finalized amendments to its January rule, which are just a half-hearted and incomplete set of corrections to try and fix the flawed rule,” Bakst told the DCNF. “These amendments don’t properly comply with the Sackett opinion and fail to provide needed clarity to implement the opinion. And they did so without seeking public comment.”
The EPA exhibited a “complete disregard for private property owners and the rule of law” in its proceedings pursuant to WOTUS regulation in 2023, Bakst told the DCNF.
Neither the EPA nor the White House responded immediately to a request for comment.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
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Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
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