Carbon Pipelines Negative T
Environment Turn – Mining – AT: Regs Solve
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- Environment Turn – Drinking Water
- AT: Coal Advantage – Transition Now
- Utilities are bailing on coal now
- The aff can’t reverse this trend – it’s because of low natural gas prices
Environment Turn – Mining – AT: Regs SolveExisting regulations fail—not enforced and contamination persistsPalmer et al. 10 – Director National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center Professor Department of Entomology University of Maryland Professor Chesapeake Biological Laboratory University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (Margaret, “Mountaintop Mining Consequences” Science Journal, January 8 2010, http://www.filonverde.org/images/Mountaintop_Mining_Consequences_Science1%5B1%5D.pdf) MLR A Failure of Policy and Enforcement The U.S. Clean Water Act and its implementing regulations state that burying streams with materials discharged from mining should be avoided. Mitigation must render nonsignifi cant the impacts that mining activities have on the structure and function of aquatic ecosystems. The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act imposes requirements to minimize impacts on the land and on natural channels, such as requiring that water discharged from mines will not degrade stream water quality below established standards. Yet mine-related contaminants persist in streams well below valley fills, forests are destroyed, headwater streams are lost, and biodiversity is reduced; all of these demonstrate that MTM/VF causes significant environmental damage despite regulatory requirements to minimize impacts. Current mitigation strategies are meant to compensate for lost stream habitat and functions but do not; water-quality degradation caused by mining activities is neither prevented nor corrected during reclamation or mitigation. Clearly, current attempts to regulate MTM/ VF practices are inadequate. Mining permits are being issued despite the preponderance of scientific evidence that impacts are pervasive and irreversible and that mitigation cannot compensate for losses. Considering environmental impacts of MTM/VF, in combination with evidence that the health of people living in surface-mining regions of the central Appalachians is compromised by mining activities, we conclude that MTM/VF permits should not be granted unless new methods can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems. Regulators should no longer ignore rigorous science. The United States should take leadership on these issues, particularly since surface mining in many developing countries is expected to grow extensively ( 32). Environment Turn – Drinking WaterContaminates drinking waterNeural Energy 12 “Carbon Transport & Sequestration,” http://www.neuralenergy.info/2011/09/carbon-sequestration.html Drinking Water Contamination - If CO2 gets into shallow freshwater aquifers, small amounts of trace metals will be freed from the rock volume. In a laboratory experiment, researchers exposed the experimental water samples to a flow of CO2 designed to simulate a slow leak and observed chemical changes that occurred over the course of more than 300 days. The CO2 caused the pH of the water in all the samples to drop 1–2 units as the gas reacted with the water to form carbonic acid. The drop in pH caused the rock in the samples to weather, increasing the concentration in the water of elements that had been previously part of the rock. Although the specific chemical changes depended on the unique geochemistry of each sample’s respective site, the authors report that on the whole, CO2 caused concentrations of alkali and alkali earth elements, as well as manganese, cobalt, nickel and iron, to increase—in some cases by more than two orders of magnitude. Concentrations of aluminum, manganese, iron, zinc, cadmium, selenium, barium, thallium and uranium in some samples neared or exceeded maximum contaminant levels set by the EPA. AT: Coal Advantage – Transition NowUtilities are transitioning to natural gas now – it’s because of low prices, not regulationsBertrand 6-11 Pierre, “Blame Coal's Hardship On Economic Factors, Not Federal Regulations, Says EPA Administrator,” International Business Times, http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/350973/20120611/coal-natural-gas-epa-lisa-jackson.htm U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said Monday her environmental policies are not to blame for the coal industry's current hardships, despite tougher emission standards the industry says increases their costs and dampens demand for coal. Speaking to the Guardian, Jackson said coal's share of electricity generation in the U.S. is diminishing for purely economic reasons, and the EPA's enforcement of carbon capture devices is not a major factor. The U.S. Energy Information Administration said coal's share of electric generation has fallen to 34 percent, its lowest point since 1973. It's being supplanted by natural gas, whose price is depressed thanks to advances in drilling techniques. Because it's cheaper to burn natural gas, utilities are making the switch. "So in my opinion the problem for coal right now is entirely economic," Jackson said. "The natural gas that this country has and is continuing to develop is cheaper right now on average. And so people who are making investment decisions are not unmindful of that. How could you expect them to be?"
Steve, “Coal losing favor as energy source for electric plants Environmental concerns, lower prices are changing officials’ outlooks, Black & Veatch survey finds,” http://www.kansascity.com/2012/06/04/3642393/coal-losing-favor-as-energy-source.html#storylink=cpy King coal is rapidly losing support among many who were once its most fervent supporters, electric utility executives, according to a new report by a subsidiary of Black & Veatch. Low natural gas prices and environmental regulations have had coal on the defensive for some time. But utility executives, despite using more natural gas to generate power, have been reluctant to abandon the idea of coal as the best economical option. But that relationship is changing. Black & Veatch, an Overland Park engineering and consulting firm that regularly surveys the industry, a year ago found that 82 percent of utility executives responding said that coal had a future when “fiscal realities were fully considered.” But in this year’s report, that number fell to 58 percent. “The percentage of respondents who believe there is a future for coal in the United States has dropped significantly,” the report concluded. The aff can’t reverse this trend – it’s because of low natural gas pricesWald 12 Matthew, “With Natural Gas Plentiful and Cheap, Carbon Capture Projects Stumble,” NYT, Proquest But even as the Environmental Protection Agency prepares to open hearings on the proposed rule, unveiled in March, industry experts say the persistently low price of natural gas is threatening the viability of the nation’s carbon capture projects. Natural gas is so cheap and plentiful that utilities have little incentive to build coal-fired plants with the capture technology. And the proposed rule exempts existing coal- and gas-fired plants. In the tiny universe of American carbon capture projects, the first casualty may be the Taylorville Energy Center, a project in the coal fields of Illinois. The plan was to cook coal into methane, capture the carbon dioxide released in the process, then burn the methane in a conventional natural gas-style power plant. But Taylorville’s backers, unable to persuade the state legislature to approve the project because of its estimated $3.5 billion price, are considering deferring the coal element and simply building the gas-burning plant for one-third the cost. “It’s primarily due to the low natural gas prices, and how that affects the political environment,” said Bart Ford, a vice president of Tenaska, the developer. “We’re not changing the nature of the facility, just deferring the synthetic natural gas portion.” Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.92 Mb. Share with your friends:
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