2014 ndi 6ws – Fitzmier, Lundberg, Abelkop
Download 0.68 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Energy is not a main focus to anyone
- Off-shore wind development unpopular – “place attachment”
- IMPACTS AT: EPA Regs
- No impact to EPA regs—doesn’t impact economy
Energy Link TurnsWest VirginiaEnergy policies are unpopular in West Virginia – interests in coalPolitico, 14 – (“All Policy is Local, presented by Choose Energy: Welcome to Energy and the Midterms — Primary day in West Virginia, Nebraska — Outside spending roundup — Top Senate and House races”, Politico, 5/13/14, http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/all-policy-is-local-presented-by-choose-energy-welcome-to-energy-and-the-midterms-primary-day-in-west-virginia-nebraska-106617.html)//EX West Virginia: Capito has a solid lead over Tennant — but in either event, coal interests win. Both have come out swinging in favor of coal and against the Obama administration’s climate and energy agenda. They are running to replace the retiring Jay Rockefeller, who in recent years has criticized the coal industry over safety issues and pollution. Bonus: Capito picked up an endorsement Monday from the West Virginia Coal Association. AT: New HampshireEnergy is not a main focus to anyonePolitico, 14 – (“All Policy is Local, presented by Choose Energy: Welcome to Energy and the Midterms — Primary day in West Virginia, Nebraska — Outside spending roundup — Top Senate and House races”, Politico, 5/13/14, http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/all-policy-is-local-presented-by-choose-energy-welcome-to-energy-and-the-midterms-primary-day-in-west-virginia-nebraska-106617.html)//EX New Hampshire: Polls have shown Democrat Jeanne Shaheen maintaining a small lead against Republican challenger Scott Brown. While energy isn’t likely to be a major focus of the race, Shaheen could get a bump from her long-delayed energy efficiency bill with Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) — even though, at the moment, the bill seems dead in the water once again. Even becalmed, the bill gives Shaheen a chance to tout her bipartisan credentials. Off-shore WindOff-shore wind development unpopular – “place attachment”Alexander, 10 – community engagement specialist for MLive Muskegon Chronicle (Dave, “University of Delaware researcher says 'place attachment' prompts backlash against wind farm development”, Michigan Live, 6/15/10, http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2010/07/university_of_delaware_researc.html)//EX Firestone also has a doctorate in public policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, earned after working in the Michigan Attorney General's Office on permitting of hydroelectric plants. He has been teaching public policy courses on offshore wind developments and researching public opinion on the subject since 2003 through the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean and Environment. Firestone and his research colleagues began surveying public opinion on the Cape Wind project in 2004. He quickly learned that opposition to offshore wind farms is not a classic "not in my backyard" reaction. Instead, opposition mainly to the visual impact of turbines seen from land or from boats causes a psychological reaction known as "place attachment." Basically, it is an emotional attachment to surroundings that are familiar. Any "disruption" of those surroundings that people see as the essence of a specific location creates a negative backlash. Opponents who live or play along the shorelines find wind farms threatening the very essence of themselves and their communities, Firestone said. Place attachment is greater in protected bays like Nantucket Sound than on the open ocean like off the coast of Delaware, the researcher said. Firestone said he'd guess that the place attachment feelings for Lake Michigan would be somewhere between a protected bay and the open ocean. IMPACTSAT: EPA RegsGOP No CutThe GOP can’t cut EPA regs --- Obama will veto, and they can’t use appropriations bills eitherBiber 6/19/14 – Eric Biber is a Professor of Law @ Berkeley Law, “The 2014 Midterm Elections and the EPA Greenhouse Gas Rule,” LegalPlanet, Berkeley/UCLA Law, http://legal-planet.org/2014/06/19/the-2014-midterm-elections-and-the-epa-greenhouse-gas-rule/ The 2014 Midterm Elections and the EPA Greenhouse Gas Rule Why Republicans probably won't be able to eliminate the EPA rules before 2016¶ I wrote earlier about why the 2016 Presidential election will be the election that matters (politically) for the long-term success of the new greenhouse gas rules proposed by EPA. (The status of legal challenges is a different question.) I want to elaborate a little more now about why the 2014 midterm elections are pretty much irrelevant to the political future of those rules.¶ First, it is important to remember that if Congress wants to amend the Clean Air Act to prohibit these rules, there are two significant obstacles: First, the filibuster rule in the Senate requires 60 votes to move to a final vote on any substantive legislation; and second, and more significantly, President Obama is sure to veto any efforts to eliminate these rules. (It is hard to imagine Obama letting Congress eliminate his primary second-term policy achievement.) Overriding a veto requires a two-thirds majority in both houses. It is highly unlikely that Republicans would attain a two-thirds majority in either house, even with alliances from coal-state Democrats. For instance, in the House, Prof. Sabato at the University of Virginia (a leading election prognosticator) predicts that the Democrats will retain at least 190 seats in the House, with the Republicans attaining at most 245. However, a veto-override in the House requires at least 290 votes (two-thirds of 435 House seats). The primary coal-producing states in America are: Montana, Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky. (Helpful map here; see also this map for the how important coal is for energy production in various states.) In these states, there are currently 25 Democratic House members. Even if every single one voted to override (improbable, since, for instance, Democratic House members representing Chicago aren’t going to vote to override the President on this issue), the Republicans would be 20 votes short of an override. And in the Senate, Prof. Sabato predicts a gain of up to 8 Republican Senators, increasing the Republicans from 45 to 53, still short of the 67 needed to override, even with votes from coal-state Democratic senators (of whom there are only 8, but two of these are among those who would be those who would lose if the Republicans gain these states). Even if you add in the three Democratic Senators from the other major fossil-fuel dependent states (Alaska, Louisiana, and North Dakota) Republicans still come up short (and again, two of these three are among those who are up for election this fall in any case). A substantive revision of the Clean Air Act seems highly unlikely.¶ A second option that Republicans are mulling is forcing a showdown over the budget by inserting language prohibiting EPA from spending any money on the regulations. This allows the Republicans to avoid the 60 vote filibuster requirement in the Senate, but it still requires overcoming a Presidential veto (as above, highly unlikely). The main leverage here is that the budget has to pass – otherwise the government will shutdown. But given what happened the last time the Republicans tried to use a government shutdown to force Obama to give up a signature policy achievement, I think Republicans will also be unlikely to succeed here. After all, when Republicans tried to use a shutdown to defund Obamacare, they were pummeled politically.¶ Indeed, the polling indicates that the EPA regulations are more popular at the national level than Obamacare, so the national politics are even less favorable to the Republicans here. Moreover, despite the unpopularity of these rules in particular parts of the country, the national public support for the rules means that these rules are very unlikely to have a major impact on the political races at a national level. Republicans who are hoping that a “wave” election can be inspired by these rules will probably be disappointed. Democratic Senate candidates in states like Iowa and Colorado are embracing the new rules. And in fact, Democrats have mostly already lost their prior position in “coal country” – there just isn’t much more to lose, and therefore there isn’t much political price to be paid by Democrats for these rules. So I doubt there will be much national pressure on the party to back away from the rules. (Interestingly, the White House apparently is taking its political cues in part from the failure of the 2010 ballot initiative in California to repeal the state’s greenhouse gas regulations, which I discussed in my first post.) Doesn’t Kill EconNo impact to EPA regs—doesn’t impact economyJeff Spross, blogger for ThinkProgress, 6/3/14 Jeff, blogger for ThinkProgress, a liberal American political blog serving as an outlet of the Center for American Progress, an independent nonpartisan educational, public policy research, and advocacy organization, citing data from The Economic Policy Institute, "Why EPA's Carbon Regulations Won't Ruin The Economy, In Three Simple Steps", June 3 2014, thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/06/03/3444064/epa-explainer-economy/ On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced new regulations to curb carbon dioxide emissions from America’s existing power plants — the most significant step taken by any U.S. president to address climate change.¶ In combination with the agency’s previous carbon rules for new power plants, Monday’s regulations are the linchpin in the President’s effort to meet the United States’ international commitment to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.¶ Critics pounced rapidly, calling the regulations job killers and a drag on the economy. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) cited a pre-emptive analysis from the Chamber of Commerce that the rules would leave hundreds of thousands of people out of work each year, and put a drag on economic growth. Not to be outdone, Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)called the regulations “a dagger in the heart of the American middle class,” and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) dismissed them as “all pain, no gain.”¶ Here are three reasons why they’re wrong.¶ 1. The Regulations Are Designed To Be Market-Friendly¶ Boehner, McConnell and Vitter all fail to mention a crucial caveat: only electricity that’s created by emitting a lot of carbon, such as power derived from coal, will get more expensive. They then leap to claiming the cost of electricity will go up. That requires the unspoken assumption that American firms and individuals won’t be able to move off high-carbon electricity effectively and cheaply. But markets work by pursuing low-cost solutions to problems through decentralized experimentation among businesses. The better and cheaper the solution, the more profits a firm will make, so they have an inherent incentive. And the new regulations are designed to work with those market forces as much as possible.¶ Each state is given a carbon emission rate to reach (how much carbon can be released per unit of electricity generated), but then the state and its electricity providers can use a wealth of different methods to hit their target. They can build new renewable energy capacity; they can build new natural gas capacity; they can run less carbon-intensive plants more often; they can cut demand for high-carbon electricity through a smorgasbord of efficiency programs; they can install carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) on their coal plants (a technological gamble, admittedly); or they could go with other technological improvements to update and clean up the country’s aging fleet of coal plants. They can even set up a state-level cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax. States can even band together to create regional systems, like the Northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.¶ And that’s just the options that immediately come to mind. Even better technologies for scrubbing carbon dioxide from power plant emissions could be on the horizon.¶ The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) modeled a very similar proposal to the regulatory design EPA ultimately hit on, and found it would actually cut Americans’ electricity bills, thanks largely to improvements in energy efficiency. EPA’s own forecast of its regulations also found a drop in electricity bills.¶ By contrast, the Chamber of Commerce arrived at its results by assuming a much deeper emissions cut than EPA chose, by assuming demand for electricity would grow much faster in the immediate future than it has since 2000, and by assuming EPA would require CCS technology on natural gas plants. (It didn’t.)¶ 2. Critics Have Overestimated The Costs Of Regulations For Decades¶ Since its creation in 1970, EPA has been issuing rules for everything from coal furnaces to chlorofluorocarbons to urban air quality. The Economic Policy Institute surveyed this history, and found that over and over, estimates made before the regulations went into effect — often estimates made by the EPA itself — significantly overshot how much compliance would actually cost American industry. In December 2011, EPA finalized new rules to cut emissions of mercury, lead, and other toxins from coal plants. The Chamber of Commerce predicted rolling blackouts, and former Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) warned the regulations would “put tens of thousands of jobs in [Indiana] directly at risk.” There were no blackouts, and jobs in Indiana rose from late-2011 to mid-2014, while the unemployment rate dropped.¶ In 1990, Congress passed a law directing the EPA to install a national cap-and-trade system to cut down on the sulfur dioxide emissions that cause acid rain. Industry, lobbying groups, and political critics all predicted spikes in electricity rates and major hits to economic growth and jobs. Instead, the trajectory of economic growth remained steady, as did employment in manufacturing (usually the sector hardest hit by higher electricity rates), and the national cost of electricity continued to decline through the late 1990s. Even more tellingly, the Center for American Progress found that almost all of the 10 states most dependent on coal power saw their inflation-adjusted electricity rates fall from 1990 to 2009 — despite industry predictions they would jump.¶ The key thing to remember is there’s no inherent profitability in cutting carbon until forces like EPA’s regulations step in to create that profitability. That means firms and businesses generally haven’t tried that market experimentation yet, and don’t know what they can really achieve. So they overestimate — again and again — how costly implementing regulations will be. Brian McLean, the former director of EPA’s Clean Air Markets Division, told ThinkProgress in an earlier interview that when power companies actually started installing the technology to cut sulfur dioxide emissions after the 1990 law was passed, it regularly outperformed industry predictions — sometimes significantly.¶ 3. There Are Positive Economic Benefits To Regulations, Too¶ The general hit on regulations is that they create unforeseen ripple effects throughout the economy, damaging jobs and growth. But this assumes all of the unforeseen ripple effects are negative. They aren’t.¶ For one thing, EPA’s regulations will drive demand away from carbon-heavy electricity and into other emerging sectors like renewable electricity, energy efficiency, and new technological implementation. That will create new jobs in those sectors to offset jobs lost in traditional coal power. NRDC’s analysis showed its proposal would create 274,000 jobs in energy efficiency in 2020 — that alone would reduce the job loss the Chamber projected for 2020 by almost two-thirds. We can also expect job creation in renewable energy, as well as in pollution control technology and installation.¶ But arguably even more important than growth in those sectors are the health benefits of cutting power plant emissions. The sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and particulate matter that get released when power plants burn coal drive up rates of asthma attacks, respiratory disease, heart disease, and a host of other ailments. This is a big reason why the 1990 sulfur dioxide laws and lots of other regulations actually helped the economy: the economic benefits of lives saved, hospital visits prevented, and an overall healthier workforce far outweighed the compliance costs to businesses.¶ Now, carbon dioxide itself isn’t an immediate threat to human health — most of the economic benefits of avoiding climate change are loaded into the future — but cutting carbon emissions inevitably cuts those other pollutants as well. So when NRDC ran the numbers on its proposal for the carbon rules, found the benefits of the emissions cuts, excluding the benefits of avoiding climate change, would outpace the costs in 2020 by roughly $6 billion to $19 billion.¶ And when the EPA modeled the actual regulations, it found annual costs to the economy of $7.3 billion to $8.8 billion annually, versus benefits of $55 billion to $93 billion by 2030. The benefits are primarily thanks to the health effects, which includeavoiding 2,700 to 6,600 premature deaths and 140,000 to 150,000 asthma attacks in children.¶ Those benefits will not be far in the future, they will arrive much faster. And because poor and minority Americans are disproportionately harmed by coal pollution, they’ll also enjoy the bulk of those benefits.¶ In short, the unforeseen positive effects of EPA’s regulations will likely overwhelm the foreseen negative effects. Directory: wp-content -> uploads -> 2014 2014 -> For want of a nail 2014 -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 2014 -> Ihbb asian Championships 2014 middle school bowl Round 4 First Quarter 2014 -> Ihbb european Championships 2014 Bowl Round 4 First Quarter 2014 -> International History Bee and Bowl 2013-14 Asian Division Question Set Bowl Round Six 2014 -> United states patent and trademark office 2014 -> Coffs harbour eisteddfod vocal syllabus 2014 -> Listen News Programs Schedule pledge now 2014 -> Slow club announce third album complete surrender Download 0.68 Mb. Share with your friends:
|