Lisa P. Jackson
EPA Administrator
Telling the Truth About the Environment and Our Economy Posted: 8/31/11 04:31 PM ET
It's a certainty in Washington that lobbyist talking points and inside-the-beltway speeches are going to be overblown and exaggerated. But lately, misleading claims about the EPA's work have been making their way into the mainstream debate.
The most notable is an industry report that the EPA is responsible for an unprecedented "train wreck" of clean air standards that will lead to the mass closure of power plants. The "train wreck" claim has been repeated by everyone from congressional leaders to major newspapers. It sounds pretty scary, but the trouble with these reports -- there is no "train wreck."
Earlier this month a Congressional Research Service report concluded that industry's claims were made "before EPA proposed most of the rules whose impacts they analyze," and are based on "more stringent requirements than EPA proposed in many cases."
On the issue of plant closures, I take the word of industry leaders like the Chairman and CEO of Exelon Corporation, who said "These regulations will not kill coal... up to 50% of retirements are due to the current economics of the plant due to natural gas and coal prices." The Congressional Research Service report also found that EPA's standards will primarily affect "coal-fired plants more than 40 years old that have not, until now, installed state-of-the-art pollution controls." That echoed the remarks of the CEO of American Electric Power from April of this year: "We've been quite clear that we fully intend to retire the 5,480 megawatts of our overall coal fleet because they are less efficient and have not been retrofitted in any particular way."
This is just one example from the larger debate ...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-p-jackson/republicans-epa_b_943972.html