Obama decision also a rebuke of Ritter admin
President Barack Obama put a halt to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed air-quality standards just before the Labor Day weekend. The Wall Street Journal opined that the president cited the struggling economy as his main reason for not wanting to tighten ozone regulations at this time: Come January 2010, the Obama EPA said it […]
NREL's fuel fantasies
The Wall Street Journal published published a brief editorial titled “Cellulosic Ethanol and Unicorns” blasting the government’s unrealistic expectations about the commercially mythical fuel cellulosic ethanol, “second-generation fuels made from stocks like switchgrass or the wood chips that George W. Bush invoked in his 2006 State of the Union.” At the time of Bush’s speech, […]
Oops! No EPA threat over SIP
Lawmakers (including those in leadership on both sides of the aisle), Xcel Energy, environmentalists, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, the Public Utilities Commission and any other group that championed Colorado’s needlessly expensive, likely illegal Regional Haze State Implementation Plan (SIP) have A LOT of explaining to do. We were told repeatedly that if […]
CDPHE’s Regional Haze State Implementation Plan: At Least $100 Million Too Expensive
On January 15, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) submitted to the General Assembly a State Implementation Plan (SIP) to comply with the Regional Haze provision of the Clean Air Act. The General Assembly must approve the SIP before it can be sent to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for final review. […]
HB 1365 Update: Xcel Remains Undecided; Coal Interests Begin To Litigate, Promise More
Regarding HB 1365 (a.k.a. the Clean Air Clean Jobs Act), the big news is that Xcel has yet to make up its mind. As I noted here, the Minneapolis-based utility has the authority under HB 1365 to veto the fuel switching implementation plan chosen by the PUC on December 10. So far, Xcel has kept […]
EPA’s Ozone Decision Means That HB 1365 Is Most Cost-Ineffective Environmental Policy, Ever
The putative mission of HB 1365 is for Colorado to address “reasonably foreseeable” federal air quality regulations in a holistic fashion, which is supposedly more cost-effective than a piece-meal approach. When it rolled out the legislation, the Ritter administration told the PUC that there were eleven “current and foreseeable air quality requirements (see slides 13 […]
Can CDPHE Be Trusted To Measure Ozone?
Earlier this month, I asked whether CDPHE (a.k.a., “the Department”) is cooking the books on Colorado ozone. In particular, it struck me as suspicious that the Department used data from 2006, an anomalously active wildfire season, as inputs for models used to project ambient air concentrations of ozone through 2020. You can read all about […]
Environmental Audits: Colorado Carrots versus Federal Sticks
Environmental regulation has experienced tremendous growth in the last quarter century. Much of this growth has occurred at the federal level, resulting in a heavily centralized, command-and-control bureaucracy overseeing virtually all aspects of environmental protection, including enforcement. State and local governments are a significant part of the enforcement scheme, but under strict federal oversight. This approach to achieving compliance has several limitations, and is beginning to show signs of obsolescence. The current system is inflexible, inefficient, costly, unduly adversarial, and does not maximize environmental protection.
Clearing the Air on Carbon Monoxide: Fatal Scientific Flaws in the EPA Crackdown on Denver and Other
Denver is one of 59 U.S. cities that are under scrutiny by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, facing economic sanctions in the form of withheld federal highway funds and pollution control grants. This action is being contemplated by the government because these cities have not achieved compliance with EPAs ambient air quality standard for carbon monoxide (CO), as mandated by the Clean Air Act.
