New EPA Rule

🇺🇸 I'm not opposed to the EPA's new rule.

Most Americans, except for the ones in Appalachia, want to retire coal power plants. We will accept natural gas as a green energy alternative, but we want to capture carbon emissions from natural gas power plants. The goal of the new EPA rule is to lower our emissions and to curb climate change. This should be a bipartisan goal. Climate change deniers are absurdists, not realists, and we really don't have time for absurdism in politics. The natural disasters we are experiencing: severe droughts, wild fires, flooding... are costing us much more than effective climate change policy would cost us to implement. But we do need to make the clean energy transition a smooth transition without hurting the Americans that are dependent on the old fossil fuel industries like the coal industry for their livelihoods. Instead of turning this into a partisan fight or culture war, the issue could easily be reframed as new opportunities for the Appalachian region with big investments to modernize the energy industry in that region.

The EPA is doing exactly what Americans want - creating a rule for power plants to lower their emissions and protect the environment. That is what the agency was created for. Now we expect the US Department of Energy to put together a viable plan to help power plants become compliant. We would expect the US Department of Energy to offer guidance and funding on carbon capture technology and green hydrogen for natural gas power plants, depending on which solution or combination thereof they choose. We also expect the US Department of Energy to work with the grid operators to ensure that there are not any capacity shortfalls in any region in the USA, because of the new rule. We expect the US Department of Energy to put together a blueprint for the clean energy transition to ensure that the clean energy transition is smooth with no blackouts or high energy prices, and to not leave all of the energy transition details up to businesses and market forces.

xo