If Obama's New Rule Holds, It's the End of New American Coal Plants

If Obama gets his way, no new coal plants will be built in the US—maybe ever. The Environmental Protection Agency just released new carbon pollution rules today, and they're tough enough to halt the nation's dirtiest mode of energy production dead in its tracks.

Coal is the number one contributor to climate change worldwide. Nothing else is baking us nearly as fast. If we want to address planetary warming, we start there. Coal plants also spew out dangerous particulate pollution, which cause numerous of health problems, too. That's why the administration honed in on all of the above while announcing the rules.

"We know this is not just about melting glaciers," EPA chief Gina McCarthy said, according to the AP. "Climate change—caused by carbon pollution—is one of the most significant public health threats of our time. That's why EPA has been called to action."

However, the rule won't effect existing power plants. The dirty, hulking dinosaur coal plants that power about a third of our nation will go on being dirty hulking dinosaurs. But they're not going to get any additions to the family any time soon.

The new regulations work by limiting how many pounds of CO2 can be released per unit of electricity produced. New coal plants will no longer be allowed to produce more than 1,100 pounds of carbon per megawatt hour of power they generate.

As Mother Jones points out, "advanced new coal plants produce more than 1,600 pounds per megawatt hour, so to meet the new benchmark, they'd have to substantially cut their carbon emissions." The EPA is proposing similar rules for natural gas plants, but since natural gas plants emit far less carbon—they do about 790 pounds per megawatt hour—they already fit the bill.

Essentially, if someone wants to build a new coal plant, in order to make it clean enough to meet these new rules, they'll have to invest in Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) technology. CCS is a highly experimental (and highly expensive) technology that allows coal plants to pump their emissions underground instead of releasing them into the atmosphere.

EPA chief Gina McCarthy recently told Grist that "We are very confident that the data is showing that carbon capture and sequestration is technologically feasible and it’s available."

"If coal wants a place in a carbon-constrained future, they have to look at technology like this," she said.

Unfortunately for the coal companies, but thankfully for pretty much everyone else on the planet, nobody really thinks CCS will work. It's enormously expensive to build enough infrastructure underground to accommodate the tens of thousands of pounds of CO2 that would be pumped down every day, and natural gas is already cheaper than coal, anyway.

See, plans for new coal plants are already exceedingly rare, because natural gas is simply much cheaper. Fracking has opened up vast new natural gas reserves, driving its price down. So nat gas plants were pushing coal plants out of the market anyway; they just had the additional benefit of being twice as clean.

And herein lies the big deal: Even if these rules won't change a whole hell of a lot right now, they will act as a guarantee that we won't backslide into coal if the fracking bubble bursts and prices climb again.

Obama has gotten plenty of criticism that he's waging a war on coal by proposing rules on power plants like this—and this time, he actually is. Good. If there's going to be any hope of heading off catastrophic global temperature rise, this is sort of a war we need to win. ABC News put it nicely by writing that, with these rules, Obama is trying to move us "from a coal-dependent past into a future fired by cleaner sources of energy."

That's right. Coal is our smoggy past, and it's suffocating us. Let's put it out of its misery and clear the air.