coal – Energy Law Professor

Legal Debate on EPA’s Power Plan Takes Center Stage

March 30, 2015 energylawprof 2 comments

For the past two weeks, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “Clean Power Plan” for power sector carbon emissions has been the center of an ongoing debate between some of the nation’s foremost constitutional and environmental law scholars.

As described in previous posts, the Clean Power Plan aims to place caps on greenhouse gas emissions (or emissions intensity) from each of the 50 states in the U.S. To comply, states will have to use their coal plants less, increase their use of natural gas and renewable fuels, and improve their energy efficiency. A state can focus its effort more or less on each of these methods, so long as it meets its target.

In two earlier posts, I explained the Clean Power Plan, noting that it would attract legal arguments that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has overstepped its legal authority, and explained how the Supreme Court’s decision in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA would bolster these arguments.

Those arguments are now in full swing. Here is the back-and-forth between Professor Larry Tribe, one of the nation’s most prominent constitutional law scholars, and Professors Jody Freeman and Richard Lazarus, two of the nation’s most prominent environmental law professors. These arguments are framed as a disagreement over the constitutionality of the Clean Power Plan, but many of the arguments are really about whether EPA has the statutory authority that it claimed in the Plan.

On March 17, Harvard Law School Prof. Larry Tribe testified to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Energy and Power arguing that the Clean Power Plan is unconstitutional.

On March 18, Harvard Law School professors Jody Freeman and Richard Lazarus strongly disagreed, responding in an op-ed published at Harvard Law Today, titled “Is the President’s Climate Plan Unconstitutional?”

This started a significant back and forth that included:

A March 20 Harvard Law Today op-ed from Prof. Tribe titled “Why EPA’s Climate Plan Is Unconstitutional”;

A March 21 Harvard Law Today op-ed from Profs. Freeman and Lazarus: “A rebuttal to Tribe’s reply”;

A March 22 further reply from Prof. Tribe;

A March 27 “followup” from Profs. Freeman and Lazarus.

A March 29 final rebuttal from Prof. Tribe.

You may also want to check out:

An op-ed that Profs. Freeman and Lazarus wrote in Politico Magazine on March 25, titled “Larry Tribe and Mitch McConnell’s Flagrant Constitutional Error”; and

The testimony of Prof. Richard Revesz, another of the country’s foremost experts on environmental law and federalism, who testified at the same March 17 hearing in favor of the Clean Power Plan.

These arguments are just the opening skirmish in a running legal battle. If the Obama administration (and the administration that follows it) stays the course on the Clean Power Plan, the arguments will finally be resolved in court.

China’s Energy Future: Coal, Gas, & A Gargantuan Climate Policy Challenge

October 8, 2013 energylawprof Leave a comment

With about a fifth of the world’s population, China plays a crucial role in the world’s energy and climate futures. Right now, the developed world comprises an outsized portion of global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions compared to its population, (http://bit.ly/1bDyIIp), but per capita energy use in developing countries like China will gradually converge with levels in the developed world because of 1) catch-up growth in the developing world, 2) climate and efficiency regulations in the developed world, and 3) movement of heavy industry from the developed world to the developing world. So one way of thinking about global energy futures is that Chinese policy may some day be of comparable importance to the policies of North and South America, Western Europe, and Australia combined. (Or maybe “US policy is to China’s policy as Turkey’s policy is to US policy.”)

Map of the world divided into five regions, each with the same population as China.

So China’s climate policy is crucial. And it is currently in flux. Many years of rapid growth in coal-fired power have produced acute particulate matter air pollution problems in China: a recent study estimated that this air pollution reduced the life expectancy in northern China by 5.5 years. http://bit.ly/19aFY91. As a result, China has been seeking to develop alternative power sources such as natural gas and renewable power. Some hope that this will help slow China’s rapidly rising greenhouse gas emissions. Citi Research recently put out a report with the hopeful title, “The Unimaginable: Peak Coal in China” (http://citi.us/1cpecdP), and Bloomberg New Energy Finance published one titled “The Future of China’s Power Sector: From Centralized and Coal-Powered to Distributed and Renewable?” Two recent analyses, however, show why China’s energy policy remains a daunting challenge.

The first analysis, from Armond Cohen and Kexin Liu at the Clean Air Task Force, http://bit.ly/16tPtlf, offers a bracing reality check by simply digging into the Bloomberg and Citi studies. What they find is that China’s coal-fired plants will be a climate challenge for decades to come. As a result of the recent boom China now has 750 GW of coal-fired capacity, and even as construction slows, it is due to add 343-450 GW of new coal-fired plants by 2030. By comparison, the U.S., which until 2008 was the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, has only 300 GW of coal-fired capacity. So, China will soon have 3.5-4 times the coal-fired capacity of the United States. And unlike, the United States where most coal plants are aging, Chinese plants will still be in their prime, and may continue to operate for decades.

The second analysis, published in Nature Climate Change, analyzes China’s plans to produce synthetic natural gas (SNG) from coal at over 40 massive plants. http://bit.ly/1a675Ru. Burning SNG instead of coal would lower particulate matter pollution in China’s cities, but SNG takes large amounts of energy to produce, which means that, all things considered, it leads to even more greenhouse gas emissions than coal. (SNG has roughly seven-times the greenhouse gas impact of regular natural gas, and 136-182% the impact of coal-fired plants.) Thus, if coal is replaced with SNG, it will just make the world’s climate problems worse.

The Clean Air Task Force analysis suggests that carbon capture & storage may be the only viable option to control greenhouse gas emissions from China’s burgeoning coal plants. And the SNG paper suggests that shale gas might be a viable alternative to SNG within China. Both potential solutions have detractors. What is clear, however, is that Chinese energy policy will be a crucial and daunting challenge for decades to come.