ALI Director Richard L. Revesz and Jack Lienke, attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity, wrote the op-ed “Obama Takes a Crucial Step on Climate Change” that was published in The New York Times on August 3, 2015.
Director Revesz and Mr. Lienke open the piece by stating that “President Obama’s Clean Power Plan has rightly been hailed as the most important action any president has taken to address the climate crisis.”
The authors argue for the importance of the President’s plan, not only for the good it will do to reduce emissions nationally, but for the message it sends to other countries about our commitment to the environment.
Although Director Revesz and Mr. Lienke admit that it is likely that some coal plants will close due at least in part to the Clean Power Plan, they contend that “most of the coal plants at risk should have been shuttered years ago. Traditionally, the economically useful life of a coal-fired plant was thought to be about 30 years. As of 2014, coal-fired plants in the United States had been operating for an average of 42 years, and many plants had been in service far longer.”
They continue, “Unsurprisingly, these clunkers tend to pollute at a far higher rate than more modern plants. Since 1990, a vast majority of the new electric generation capacity in the United States has been built to burn natural gas. Gas plants emit, on average, half the carbon dioxide, a third of the nitrogen oxides and a hundredth of the sulfur oxides per megawatt hour that coal plants do. The second largest source of new capacity has been wind power, which creates no air pollution at all.”
Read the full op-ed here.
Director Revesz and Mr. Lienke are co-authors of the forthcoming book “Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the ‘War on Coal.’”