CATF is working to enact a strong climate bill that includes a declining cap on GHG emissions and provides performance standards and incentives for zero-carbon electric generation through carbon capture and sequestration. As attention shifts to the Senate’s climate legislation, CATF continues to provide detailed analysis of key provisions and proposals, as we did when the House passed its own climate bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. CATF was asked to calculate the regional impacts of the proposed cap, in order to estimate the amount of funds that would be necessary to protect electricity consumers from price increases on a regional basis and to get an upper bound cost for the policy (minus the cost cutting provisions that were subsequently added to the bill.)
CATF is working to establish CCS on coal and other fossil fuels as detailed below:
- Financial Incentives and Reverse Auctions: To ensure adequate and rapid CCS development, we need federal incentives for coal and gas plants to use CCS; they should come from the proceeds of allowance value of a national climate policy and can take place through a variety of forms.
- Geologic Storage Utilities: Federal policy must create a new type of utility whose role is to manage and accelerate the development of storing carbon deep underground.
- Federal RD&D: New technology is needed to lower CCS costs and the role of the federal government will be a crucial supplement to the technology investments made by private companies.
- Stringent Emissions Caps on Greenhouse Gases (GHGs). In order to address climate change and to transition our energy sector to low and zero carbon technologies, a variety of policy strategies and incentives must be leveraged. One key element of any national policy solution should be a cap on GHG emissions. A cap could be either economy wide or sectoral, but in either case must be deep enough to drive dramatic changes in the electric power generating industry, which produced 40% of total U.S. domestic CO2 emissions in 2008. Congress for several years now has been working towards a federal climate policy that would place a cap on emissions, and CATF is deeply engaged in this legislative process.
- Performance Standards for New and Existing Coal and Gas-fired Power Plants and Other Industrial Sources of GHGs: Performance standards must be developed to drive CCS deployment and to provide planning certainty for emitters, financial institutions, and utility regulators in the uncertain CO2 allowance price markets that would exist under cap and trade programs.
- Retained Clean Air Act authority over GHG air pollutants. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that certain GHGs are air pollutants as defined in the Clean Air Act, and that EPA must determine whether to exercise authority to regulate them. In response, the Agency in 2009 determined that six GHGs endanger public health and welfare in the United States, paving the way for EPA to regulate these air pollutants emitted by specific sources of pollution such as power plants and cars. The Obama Administration in March 2010 finalized the first such set of regulations for cars, after bringing together states, automobile makers, and environmental organizations around a program that will reduce CO2 from light duty vehicles 20% below business as usual projections by 2030. The Administration also determined in June 2010 that it would begin regulating these pollutants emitted by the largest stationary sources of GHGs, beginning when the car rules become effective in early January 2011. Detractors of this idea, including some industry groups and their supporters in Congress, have launched an attack seeking to repeal EPA's statutory authority to issue this and other crucial climate regulations. CATF opposes these efforts and urges EPA to move ahead with a comprehensive set of GHG regulations on all major sources of GHG pollution.
CATF is providing important modeling and analysis of the air quality impacts and health damages from the nation’s power fleet, through reports such as Death, Disease and Dirty Power (2000) and Dirty Air Dirty Power (2004). To reduce the death, illness, and ecological damage from sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and toxic emissions from existing power plants, CATF supports legislation that will require significant reductions to these pollutants, such as Senator Carper’s Clean Air Act Amendments of 2010.
