Is there anything the EPA won’t regulate?
By JR Hoeft | Thursday, December 16th, 2010 | PolicyI thought that with alternative fuels, our planet was supposed to get greener, butterfiles were to flutter further, and the sun was to shine a bit brighter?
Not so fast.
Apparently biomass – you know, that so-called “green technology” that’s been advocated from McAuliffe to McDonnell – is also on the list of evils that will doom the planet and deplete the ozone layer according to our friends at the EPA.
Yep, what was supposed to be a “carbon neutral” technology, has found its way to being regulated under the Green House Gas “Tailoring Rule” by the EPA, which will treat the combustion of biomass emissions the same as emissions from the combustion of fossil fuel.
This might seem like a reasonable idea, but it will have profound economic impact on this fledgling energy source.
According to the National Alliance of Forest Owners, the increased regulation will jeapordize “over 130 renewable energy projects, between 11,000 and 26,000 green jobs, and $18 billion in capital investment across the country. The risk of reduced capacity also could prevent as many as 30 states from meeting national renewable energy targets.”
So if it’s not oil and natural gas, it’s now an energy source that the EPA admits doesn’t add CO2 to the atmosphere? From a fact sheet on the subject:
- EPA’s Tailoring Rule reverses the government’s precedent and policy regarding biomass emissions. It is well established government policy that carbon emitted in the combustion of forest biomass—unlike conventional fossil fuels—comes from CO2 that was recently removed from the air by the forest, thus resulting in a “carbon neutral” cycle.
- Neither the EPA, the Department of Energy, nor the Council on Environmental Quality count emissions of carbon dioxide from combustion of biomass when inventorying and reporting carbon dioxide emissions.
- EPA, in the final Tailoring Rule, became the first federal agency to depart from this established position and without any prior notice to the public.
- EPA’s recently stated, there is “[s]cientific consensus . . . that the CO2 emitted from burning biomass will not increase total atmospheric CO2 if this consumption is done on a sustainable basis.” Environmental Protection Agency Combined Heat and Power Partnership, Biomass Combined Heat and Power Catalog of Technologies, 96 (Sept. 2007), available at www.epa.gov/chp/documents/biomass_chp_catalog.pdf.
Is there anything these guys won’t try to regulate? These radicals have gone wild.
More importantly – quit unnecessarily increasing energy costs!
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Conservative to the core; liberal with his opinion! J.R. has been involved in politics for over a decade and has worked on several campaigns in Hampton Roads. He has served on the Executive Committee of the Republican Party of Chesapeake and the Central Committee of the Republican Party of Virginia. He is also the director of “Blogs United” in Virginia. E-mail J.R.. Follow J.R. on Twitter.
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14 Responses to "Is there anything the EPA won’t regulate?"
Woody biomass burning is only carbon neutral if the plants are first grown (thereby removing the carbon from the atmosphere) and THEN burned. If the projects simply take existing stands and burn them – well that is adding to the problem. I suspect this is at the root of the issue. You might not want to take everything written by an industry group as the gospel truth – frankly, it is simply lazy “journalism”.
Alternative energy now needs an alternative!
EPA should stand for Enough Protection Already.
EPA should stand for Enough Protection Already.
I like that, it is really very good.
If you go to the link below, you can read about global warming from people on both sides of the issue.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/
Lots of discussions about the subject in England. Government spending is 53% of the total GNP.
Any organization engages in self justifying activities. The problem only becomes serious when they can print or steal (uh tax) the money for ever increasing self congratulations.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Bearing Drift and MS, MS. MS said: Is there anything the EPA won't regulate? : Bearing Drift … http://bit.ly/hfn0Zc – Keep Watching! [...]
Burning forests to make electricity makes as much sense as cutting down your shade tree to get cooler. In response to increasing Co2 levels, the answer for some is to burn up the forests that capture much of our Co2, burn them, release that Co2 and the stored Co2 in forest soils, and release a huge carbon bomb that will take decades or centuries to recapture, if captured at all. Reducing forest cover is precisely the wrong thing to be doing if we are to intelligently reverse the damages done.
Forest burners are far from carbon neutral. This is what the Tailoring Rule is seeking to address. If it were carbon neutral, the burner industry would have no problems with the rule. If the industry was financially viable, they would not be dependent upon tax breaks and subsidies to support them.
If biomass burners were clean energy, there would not be tens of thousands of Physicians opposing this new source of very harmful particulate matter. The American Lung Association for instance is opposed to sacrificing the health of the young, elderly and impaired for these “green” scams.
With the ethanol scam, we are throwing 40% of our corn into gas tanks without impacting our oil demand, wreaking engines and significantly reducing mileage per gallon. The forest burner scam will not impact our energy consumption and more likely lead to increased consumption because of the warm and fuzzy “green” feel of it. Harpers index noted that if we were to replace our current fossil fuel consumption of electricity with forest burners, we would have a one year supply. The TVA has a proposal that might require over 40% of our forest acreage in the Tennessee Valley be burned to supply just 1/80th of current demand in the next 20 years. Thiss massive deforestation effort would only yield 400 megawatts of the expected 8000-16000 megawatt increase in demand for the period. Lots of destruction and logging equipment running full time to accomplish little. Like ethanol and the horrific soil depletion from corn production, there is virtually no current forestry done in this country that could be considered sustainable with just current demand.
We are throwing the vast majority of alternative energy monies at these get-green-quick scams at the expense of real and clean, and renewable energy technologies. Why is it that the same folks who oppose funding for NPR are so strangely silent on the huge subsidies for biomass power schemes, ethanol scammers, and the oild industry?
While we boldly move into the 21st century with 18th century technology, other nations of the world, most notably China, are investing heavily in real renewables, and will own us even more by becoming leaders in real sustainability.
Lions, and Tigers, and Bears , and now Giant Biomass Monsters, ,, Oh My.
If man-made CO2 is insignificant in the scheme of life, then other particulates released in emissions of fossil fuels is what one should pay attention to because that is important.
Stop the huge subsidies for biomass power schemes, ethanol scammers, and the oild industry? How about today for that????
But watch out for those forest burners and the Carbon Bombs. There is enough coal in the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia to supply cheap electricity for thousands of years for a huge part of the United States.
Snow prompts health authorities to urge Britons to stay inside
Health services have advised against travelling unless absolutely necessary as the freezing weather leads to a surge in injuries.
The poor Brits are having a rough time with the weather. Some people are predicting that thousands of people will die due to the weather and the failure of the government to prepare. The global warming people in the British government predicted a mild winter
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/8209545/Snow-prompts-health-authorities-to-urge-Britons-to-stay-inside.html
A total lunar eclipse set to take place next Monday night and Tuesday morning (Dec. 20-21) will be well-placed for observers across North America to catch a view. On the East Coast, it begins half an hour after midnight on Tuesday; maximum eclipse is at 3:17 a.m.
The upcoming Dec. 21 full moon — besides distinguishing itself from the others in 2010 by undergoing a total eclipse — will also take place on the same date as the solstice.
It has been about 500 years since this happened in this area.
http://www.space.com/spacewatch/total-lunar-eclipse-moon-observing-tips-101215.html
Hawkins…Please show us your imaginary report on thousands of years of coal remaining. In reality, it’s about 40-45 years. West Virginia is being flattened and that coal will be gone well before that.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/29919
And you might want to study up on the difference between weather and climate. Every time it snows the deniers get an orgasm.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_weather.html
Denny, I am having multpile ones due to all the recent snow, cold weather, and serious lack of hurricanes this year. Weren’t we supposed to have more and worse huuricanes due to flutuations in climate? Or were my global warming friends feeding me stories?
Is it possible that everything we do is dwarfed by the moods of the star that gives life to the world?
Piers Corbyn looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.
He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time – and he makes a prophecy.
He seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time.
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6882
People who believe that man-made CO2 is “evil” want Europe And North America to come up with 20 trillion dollars in NEW taxes to “fix” this problem.
I say that there is no problem to be fixed, keep your 20 trillion dollars and spend on yourself, and go buy an extra McSnark Berger as a special treat.
Of course I can not see the moon from a window, I have to go outside. It is a pretty night.
That was an interesting free event to celebrate the winter solstice. Thank you Mother Nature for something that I will never see again in my lifetime.
The British government has a plan to make Great Britain the most “green” country in the world. Some people think that the government’s plan will destroy the British economy and the entire country. There is debate about all of this.
“With so many politicians promoting hype about the risks of catastrophic climate change, it was cheering to read that the end of November and start of December were the coldest in central England since records began in 1772 (Christopher Booker, December 12). So much for global warming.
What is clear is that the climate behaves in unexpected ways all the time – regardless of what humans do.
In Roman times, wine was made from grapes at Hadrian’s Wall, while in the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain was a much colder place than in the 20th century, with frost fairs taking place over the Thames.
Despite millennia of climate change, the alarmists use any weather – extreme or moderate – to denounce what they see as the wickedness of capitalism, seemingly failing to grasp that the public view their inconsistent pronouncements as more ridiculous by the day.”
Jamie Robinson
Edinburgh
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/8212467/Whatever-the-weather-climate-alarmists-blame-mankind.html
Mummified Forest Found on Treeless Arctic Island
Now that was rather interesting too.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/12/101217-mummified-forest-canada-science-environment/
Mocked Meteorologist Piers Corbyn Gets Last Laugh on Fox News. Piers Corbyn is doing a better job of predicting the weather then the British Government. He seems to think that global warming “alarmists” use failed science based on fraudulent data.
http://video.foxnews.com/v/4475360/mocked-meteorologist-gets-last-laugh/?playlist_id=86861
I plan to increase my expertise in food security, participation of the marginalised, indigenous people, gender and environmental justice in the context of climate change by a special hands-on project focusing on indigenous peoples’ experiences of carbon mitigation projects in relation to land displacement, food security and gender..
Wonder what government agencies could provide a modest 100k in funding for this environmental project?
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