Energy Policies

A Tale of Two Electricities: Cal vs. Texas

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

This post reblogs  California Vs. Texas In Electricity: Comparing The Two States 1 In 5 Americans Call Home by Chuck Devore in Forbes.  Text in italics with my bolds.

The two most-populous states, California and Texas, are home to one in five Americans. More alike than different in many aspects—diverse population and economy, abundant natural resources—the two states differ in one important respect: policy. With some exceptions, California is progressively liberal while Texas is free market conservative.

These states’ similarities and differences invite comparisons that can be useful in illuminating policy choices among the states and at the national level as well. This essay is one in a series that examines those differences—in this case, electricity and related efficiency.

California policymakers have made aggressive moves towards renewable electricity production and energy efficiency over the past couple of decades. While doing so, they frequently tout the state’s nation-leading electric efficiency and its reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.

California does use the least amount of electricity per capita of any state, at 6,536 kilowatt hours per year in 2016, compared to the average of 11,634 kWh nationally and 14,286 kWh in Texas.

But, that figure overlooks three very important factors.

The first is that more Californians use natural gas for their residential needs (heating their homes and water) than the average American. Thus, on measures of overall home energy efficiency, which takes into account this natural gas usage, California ranks a more average 18th in the nation with Texas coming in 35th.

The second is California’s famously mild climate. With 840 miles of coastline adjacent to the cool waters of the Pacific Ocean, the first few miles of densely populated coastal regions enjoy a temperate and dry environment, allowing many homeowners the luxury of rarely using their air conditioners. And home heating demand is very modest during the winter in Southern California, where the bulk of the population lives.

On the other hand, the farther one lives from the coast, the hotter it gets—an important consideration for the roughly one-third of Californians who don’t live near the ocean.

In contrast, Texas has vast urban areas more than 100 miles from the Gulf Coast, a body of water that, unlike the California’s section of the Pacific, produces heat-trapping humidity.

The third and most ignored reason California doesn’t use much electricity is that their tax and regulatory policies and high costs of doing business have steadily driven out industries that use a lot of energy to manufacture things such as steel and cement.

There’s irony in this, of course, and it’s this: California’s environmentally-minded leaders like to tout the virtue of their post-industrial policies, but in deindustrializing wide swaths of their economy, they have merely outsourced the energy use—and pollution—to other places and then, to add insult to injury, pay to have it shipped to California in carbon-emitting ships, planes, trains, and trucks.

In terms of electric production, California is the nation’s biggest importer of electricity. In the past, this meant a lot of coal-fired power from places such as Arizona and Utah.

But a law passed in 2006 alongside the state’s more famous AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act, effectively banned the renewal of power contracts from traditional out-of-state coal-powered generators.

As a result, “electron laundering” has arisen to fill the gap. This occurs when Californians, in the quest for green electrons to power their grid, pay British Columbians for hydropower, which the Canadians are happy sell, as they backfill their own power needs with coal power from Washington State and Alberta. It works out for everyone: California gets higher-priced power that they can claim is green, while the Canadians get American greenbacks to fund their national health care system.

To cover their tracks and keep the green mirage intact, California authorities invented a new category of imported power called “Unspecified Sources of Power” that magically provided 9.25% of California’s electric needs last year. Prior to becoming politically incorrect, these power imports were simply labeled “coal.”

In the meantime, Californians paid an average of 18.41 cents per kilowatt hour for their electricity in July 2018, 67% higher than the national average and more than double the cost of electricity in Texas. In August, California’s rates jumped to 19.08 per kWh, 110% higher than Texas’ rates. In fact, Californians’ July and August electric rates were the highest in the contiguous 48 states.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In 2004, before the advent of modern and safe hydraulic fracturing techniques that unlocked huge stores of both natural gas and oil in the continental United States, California policymakers feared a looming natural gas shortage. To address this, they planned on up to nine large liquefied natural gas terminals arrayed along the Pacific Coast from Vancouver, British Columbia to Baja California. In addition, they launched an aggressive effort to boost solar and wind power in California, assuring consumers and industry alike that, when the price of natural gas soared, California would look like geniuses for weaning themselves off of natural gas.

Reality turned out differently. Instead of rising sharply as the result of shortages, the price of natural gas plummeted 70% in the decade following 2005. This drop in the cost of the fuel that still powers more than a third of California’s grid allowed pro-renewable energy policymakers to mask the true cost of their undertaking, with cheap natural gas power more than making up for the periodic renewable power that required prodigious subsidies and costly backup power sources to keep the lights on.

In contrast, Texas pursued a market-based electric policy through deregulation. While liberal consumer advocates were quick to claim failure in the first couple of years after the 2002 electric competition law passed as higher prices signaled more producers to enter the market, in the years since, Texans have seen their retail inflation-adjusted electricity prices decline by 32 percent from 2008 to 2017.

California policymakers have now proclaimed their goal of making their electric grid 100 percent renewable by 2045. In addition, there is serious consideration being given to outlawing the internal combustion engine.

The growing gap in retail electric prices between highly regulated California and its high cost green energy vs. Texas’ competitive electric market ought to be instructive to observe in the years ahead.

Chuck DeVore is Vice President of National Initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He was a California Assemblyman and is a Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army Retired Reserve.

See also:

California: World Leading Climate Hypocrite

Renewables Hypocrisy

Ethane is Transforming World Energy

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Many of us know of methane (CH4, AKA natural gas), but overlooked in the current drilling revolution is ethane (C2H6) which is quietly transforming the world of energy. The story comes appropriately from the Houston Chronicle (H/T Master Resource). Jordan Blum writes How the ethane molecule changed the Gulf Coast — and the world Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Overview

Ethane is simply described as C2H6. But that molecule, a byproduct of natural gas, has triggered a petrochemical boom that is reshaping the Gulf Coast, the energy industry that lives here, and global markets for plastics, resins and other petrochemicals.

We followed that molecule from a Texas shale field where it is found, to the petrochemical plant where it is transformed into ethylene, the basic building block of most plastics, and to the Port of Houston, where it is shipped to Asia and other emerging consumer markets.

The impact of ethane is perhaps the most remarkable development in the remarkable story of the shale revolution. Less than three years ago, ethane was a largely unwanted byproduct of oil and gas drilling, much of it burned away in the natural gas stream flowing to power plants, businesses and homes, or flared off at well sites.

But today, ethane is feedstock for nearly half of U.S. plastics production and a valuable export to chemical companies around the world. As ethane flows from Texas shale fields, chemical and energy companies are building and expanding plants to take advantage of the cheap, plentiful raw material, plowing more than $140 billion into the Gulf Coast alone.

“It’s absolutely extraordinary this is happening in the United States,” said Neil Chapman, Exxon Mobil senior vice president. “I can assure you nobody predicted this in 2000 or even 2005.”

U.S. ethane production is projected to reach 2 million barrels a day by 2020, double the output at the height of the last drilling boom in 2014. On the journey from wellhead to market, ethane molecules will change forms several times as they are separated from natural gas, heated to become ethylene, processed into polyethylene, and ultimately extruded and molded into packaging and products that will appear on shelves in stores from Houston to Mumbai and Ho Chi Minh City.

The shale revolution is widely credited to the innovation and determination of one man, the late George P. Mitchell, son of a Greek immigrant and founder of The Woodlands. Mitchell, after striking it rich in oil, spent 35 years stubbornly focused on developing the Barnett Shale near Dallas, a play known for years as the “Wildcatters Graveyard.”

Mitchell, however, persisted, eventually combining hydraulic fracturing with horizontal drilling to unlock the complex shale rock. Mitchell didn’t frack his first profitable well until 1998, but with that success, he sold his company four years later for more than $3 billion to Devon Energy of Oklahoma City.

The shale boom was soon underway, producing oil and gas from Texas to North Dakota to the Northeast. It placed the United States among the world’s biggest energy producers, roiling global markets and upending more than 40 years of geopolitics.

And along with oil and gas came large volumes of another petroleum product known as natural gas liquids.

Three primary components can come out any successful well: crude oil, natural gas, which is essentially methane, and natural gas liquids, primarily ethane, butane and propane. Ethane is the most prevalent natural gas liquid, or NGL, and used solely as a feedstock for petrochemicals.

Mont Belvieu is built atop a salt dome formed more than 100 million years ago from deposits likely left by an ancient inland sea that cut across the North American continent. For more than 60 years, energy companies have used it as a natural storage tank, carving out salt caverns some 3,000 feet deep to hold millions of barrels of petroleum products.

Today, those caverns are increasingly filled with ethane and other natural gas liquids that feed the plastics and chemical industries, making Mont Belvieu and its neighbor to the south, Baytown, the focal point of the Gulf Coast petrochemical boom. Here, where rice fields once stretched as far as the eye could see, Exxon Mobil alone has invested some $6 billion to dramatically expand its 36-year-old plastics plant as well as its sprawling refining and chemicals complex in Baytown.

At these plants, the ethane molecules that squeezed through fissures in shale rock, flowed up a Texas well and traveled more than 150 miles by pipeline, will undergo chemical changes to transform them from once-overlooked byproducts of oil and gas drilling into one of most ubiquitous materials on earth. Hundreds of other pipelines stretching across Texas and beyond will carry millions more barrels of natural gas liquids from U.S. shale fields, converging near the salt dome under Mont Belvieu’s Barbers Hill.

This is the next stop for the natural gas liquids produced by Exxon’s subsidiary XTO Energy. Here, processing plants known as fractionators use varying pressures and temperatures to break the natural gas liquids into components, each with a slightly different combination of carbon and hydrogen, including butane (C4H10), propane (C3H8), pentane (C5H12) and, of course, ethane (C2H6).

The ethane is piped 10 miles to Exxon Mobil’s Baytown complex, which is simultaneously one of the nation’s oldest and most modern plants. The refinery was built nearly a century ago by one of Exxon Mobil’s predecessor companies, Humble Oil. A chemical plant was added in 1979 and expanded in 1997.

The focus of the Baytown expansion was eight furnaces, each costing more than $100 million and standing 23 stories tall — nearly the height of NRG Stadium. The furnaces, built in Thailand, are the heart of a plant known as a cracker, which gets its name from the process that uses extreme heat to crack ethane molecules in half and trigger chemical reactions that form ethylene.

The ethylene is piped back to Mont Belvieu, where some will be stored in the salt caverns, but most will feed another process that will change the hydrocarbons liberated from Texas shale once again.

Where the Baytown complex used heat and pressure to crack ethane into ethylene, Exxon Mobil’s Mont Belvieu plant relies on chemical reactions to fuse trillions of ethylene molecules into polyethylene.

The Mont Belvieu plant opened in 1982, producing mainly low-grade, flexible polyethylene used in plastic wrap and food packaging, and expanded nine years later to produce plastic for more rigid products, such as milk bottles. The most recent expansion, completed late last year, is dedicated to high-performance polyethylene that is light, flexible and strong.

After quality testing, the plastic is loaded into as many as 35 rail cars, each holding about 200,000 pounds of polyethylene pellets, and shipped throughout the country to customers who shape the polyethylene pellets into finished plastics products. About 40 percent of the polyethylene is made for the domestic market.

Polyethylene pellets marked for export are mechanically packaged in 55-pound bags, each holding about 1 million pellets. Every hour, the plant fills about 10,000 bags, which are loaded onto pallets, each holding 55 bags, and trucked to a 70-acre storage yard. As many as 100,000 pallets are kept for up to 45 days until they can be loaded into containers and shipped out of the Port of Houston.

The Baytown and Mount Belvieu plants together employ 7,500 people, and Exxon Mobil estimates that the number doubles to 15,000 when counting contractors and jobs at local suppliers, restaurants and other businesses that support the plant. Exxon pays more than $150 million a year in local taxes and fees.

The plants also have contributed to a surge in exports that has made Houston one of few regions in the country that exports more than it imports. That brings new money into the area — tens of billions of dollars that can be used to expand business, hire workers and increase wealth.

“We’re going to have things that are made in America again and getting shipped overseas,” Fritsch said. “That’s what’s exciting about shale gas. It’s the explosion of industry again in the U.S.”

Hurricanes Not a Problem for Nuclear Power

Posted on by Ron Clutz

NASA-NOAA satellite image of the Atlantic Ocean captured on September 11, 2018 at 11:45 AM EDT showing Hurricane Florence approaching the east coast with Tropical Storm Isaac and Hurricane Helene fast on her heels.NASA/NOAA

Dr, James Conca explains in his Forbes article Hurricane Florence No Problem For Nuclear Power Plants  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Along with most everyone else, nuclear power plants in North and South Carolina, as well as Virginia, have been preparing for the natural onslaught.

Hurricane Florence will most likely hit two nuclear power plants operated by Duke Energy – their 1,870 megawatt (MW) Brunswick and 932MW Harris nuclear plants in North Carolina. If Florence turns north, it could also hit Dominion Energy’s 1,676MW Surry plant in Virginia. Brunswick is expected to get a direct hit.

The Brunswick Nuclear Power Plant, two miles north of Southport, North Carolina will get a direct hit by Hurricane Florence. But there’s no worry as nuclear plants are the most resistant to severe weather of all energy sources. The plant produces over 15 billion kWhs a year and provides power to over 4 million people.DOC SEARLS

The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is watching carefully. But no one is really worried that much will happen, contrary to lots of antinuclear fearmongering. Power outages will occur as lines and transformers are destroyed and non-nuclear buildings get damaged, and it might takes a few days to a few weeks to bring power back up, something that includes all energy sources.

‘We anticipate Hurricane Florence to be an historic storm that will impact all customers,’ said Grace Rountree, a spokeswoman for Duke. These reactors provide power to about 4 million customers in the two Carolinas.

The Brunswick plant has withstood several hurricanes since the two reactors there began operation in the mid-1970s, including Category 3 Hurricane Diana in 1984 and Category 3 Hurricane Fran in 1996. Category 4 Hurricane Hugo, the most often-compared with Florence, made landfall about 150 miles southwest of Brunswick in South Carolina in 1989.

Following protocols, the reactors at the nuclear plants have started shutting down before the hurricane is scheduled to arrive. While all nuclear reactors are protected against extreme winds, including tornado-strength gusts up to 300 mph, they shut down as a protective measure.

Food, water and other necessities are kept onsite at these nuclear plants to prepare for potential isolation of the site, and staff needed during the storm are brought in to ensure proper resources are available for an extended period.

The Carolinas have a heavy concentration of power reactors – 12 of the country’s 99 reactors. Four more reactors are in Virginia and five are in coastal Delaware and Maryland. These reactors provide enough electricity to power 30 cities the size of Raleigh.

Nuclear is the only energy source immune to all extreme weather events – by design. Plants have steel-reinforced concrete containments with over 4-foot thick walls. The buildings housing the reactors, vital equipment and used fuel have steel-reinforced concrete walls up to 7 feet thick, which are built to withstand any category hurricane or tornado. They can even withstand a plane flying directly into them.

Whether it’s hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, heat waves or severe cold, nuclear performs more reliably than anything else. There’s no better reason to retain our nuclear fleet, and even expand it, to give us a diverse energy mix that can handle any natural disaster that can occur.

James Conca

I have been a scientist in the field of the earth and environmental sciences for 33 years, specializing in geologic disposal of nuclear waste, energy-related research, planetary surface processes, radiobiology and shielding for space colonies, subsurface transport and environmental clean-up of heavy metals. I am a Trustee of the Herbert M. Parker Foundation, Adjunct at WSU, an Affiliate Scientist at LANL and consult on strategic planning for the DOE, EPA/State environmental agencies, and industry including companies that own nuclear, hydro, wind farms, large solar arrays, coal and gas plants. I also consult for EPA/State environmental agencies and industry on clean-up of heavy metals from soil and water. For over 25 years I have been a member of Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the NRDC, the Environmental Defense Fund and many others, as well as professional societies including the America Nuclear Society, the American Chemical Society, the Geological Society of America and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

Germany & California Could Already Have 100% Clean Power from Nuclear

Posted on by Ron Clutz

California Governor Jerry Brown and German Chancellor Angela Merkel SHUTTERSTOCK

Michael Shellenberger has the story at Forbes Had They Bet On Nuclear, Not Renewables, Germany & California Would Already Have 100% Clean Power  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Had California and Germany invested $680 billion into new nuclear power plants instead of renewables like solar and wind farms, the two would already be generating 100 percent or more of their electricity from clean (low-emissions) energy sources, according to a new analysis by Environmental Progress.

The analysis comes the day before California plays host to a “Global Climate Action Summit,” which makes no mention of nuclear, despite it being the largest source of clean energy in the U.S. and Europe.

Here are the two main findings from EP’s analysis:

  • Had Germany spent $580 billion on nuclear instead of renewables, it would have had enough energy to both replace all fossil fuels and biomass in its electricity sector and replace all of the petroleum it uses for cars and light trucks.
  • Had California spent an estimated $100 billion on nuclear instead of on wind and solar, it would have had enough energy to replace all fossil fuels in its in-state electricity mix.

The finding that Germany could have entirely decarbonized its transportation sector with nuclear is a significant one. That’s because decarbonizing transportation is considered a major challenge by most climate policy experts.

As a result of their renewables-only policies, California and Germany are climate laggards compared to nuclear-heavy places like France, whose electricity is 12 times less carbon intensive than Germany’s, and four times less carbon intensive than California’s.

France’s nuclear-heavy electricity is 12 times less carbon intensive than Germany’s, and four times less than California’s.EP

Thanks to its deployment of nuclear power, the Canadian province of Ontario’s electricity is nearly 90 percent cleaner than California’s, according to a recent analysis by Scott Luft, an energy analyst who tracks decarbonization and the power sector.

In the 1960s and 1970s, California’s electric utilities had planned to build a string of new reactors and new plants that were ultimately killed by anti-nuclear leaders and groups, including Governor Jerry Brown, the Sierra Club, and Natural Resources Defense Fund (NRDC).

Other nuclear plants were forced to close prematurely, including Rancho Seco and San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, while Diablo Canyon is being forced to close by California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, which excludes nuclear.

California’s power sector emissions are over twice as high today as they would have been had the state kept open and built planned nuclear plants.

But the new EP analysis underscores that the problem is not just closing plants but also choosing to build solar and wind farms instead of new nuclear power stations.

Summary

Who appointed these two mistaken politicians to lead a worldwide “fight against climate change”?

Footnote: In this short video Alex Epstein explains the problem replacing fossil fuels by wind and solar energy.

Pipedreams vs. Pipelines

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

From Globe and Mail ‘This is a project that would unify all Canadians’: Calls to reconsider Energy East pipeline

A pro-Energy East pipeline rally was met with a counter-protest Friday afternoon in Halifax, with both sides vocal about their position.

“I’m here today because I’m concerned about climate change and the impact that the Energy East pipeline would have on climate change,” said Emma Norton.

The proposed Energy East pipeline was cancelled last fall but some are hoping government will reconsider the project.

Those in favour of the project say Canada has the highest environmental standards of any major oil and gas producer in the world and want to see more Canadian energy.

“Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran are not going to ship one less barrel of oil if Canada shuts down our energy industry so it’s not a choice about oil or no oil, the global economy has a growing global demand for oil and gas,” said Jason Kenney, leader of the United Conservative Party in Alberta.

“The question is whether Canada produces more of that or if we let the Saudis and these other dictatorships monopolize global energy markets. That’s not good for the environment, that’s not good for the globe.”

Susanne Sexton is with the group that organized the pro-Energy East rally and says Canada needs jobs.

“This is a project that would unify all Canadians and when tax dollars and those workers are going to be hired to build this and people that are pulling the resources out of the ground, they’re building schools, they’re building hospitals, they’re providing money to go into social problems to provide to our elderly and our least able to care for themselves. Why are they against that?” she said.

Those against the project say they’re concerned about the potential environmental risks.

“The message is that we cannot build pipelines. We cannot continue to extract fossil fuels from the ground because they contribute to climate change and that’s a very urgent issue that we need to address,” said Norton.

Background: How Climate Pipedreams Killed Energy East

From Financial Post I helped plan Energy East, and I know the government’s excuses are bunk The former head of TransCanada’s pipeline strategy says Canada cannot afford to ignore the lessons of Energy East’s demise by Dennis McConaghy. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

I was a senior officer of TransCanada Pipelines when the Energy East project was conceived and developed commercially, up to the mid-summer of 2014 when I retired (I continue to be a shareholder but obviously I am no longer a company insider).

Two things are clear to me. One: the termination of the Energy East project is a major economic loss for Canada, removing an important option for providing market access for growing production from Canada’s oil sands resource, including direct access to eastern Canadian crude oil markets. Two: The Trudeau government should be stepping up to accept some real culpability for contributing to TransCanada’s decision to abandon the project, instead of resorting to various sophistries and distortions. The real lessons to be learned from the Energy East termination cannot be ignored if this country is to ever have a regulatory and public-policy regime conducive for private capital to take on the risks of major hydrocarbon infrastructure.

The vast majority of the $1 billion in Energy East development costs went to pursuing regulatory approval.

Understand some basic facts about this project. It was conceived and developed as an all-Canadian route-alternative to access not only domestic crude oil markets in eastern Canada but also to gain tidewater access to other global markets for Canadian oil sands production, that would not otherwise be accessible. Moreover, it would convert existing underutilized gas-pipeline capacity between Alberta and eastern Ontario, thereby providing significant competitive advantage. The project successfully gained support from a diverse group of Canadian production interests, even as other pipeline projects such as Keystone XL, Northern Gateway and the Trans Mountain expansion were already in advanced stages of development, including pursuit of regulatory approval.

Since TransCanada first filed with the National Energy Board in late 2014, the project has had to cope with litany of regulatory dysfunctions ranging from protracted information requests beyond the initial filing, recusal of the original NEB panel to be replaced by a panel of limited pertinent regulatory experience, failure to use the existing regulatory record prior to the recusal, inadequate security arrangements for attempted public hearings and, worst of all, the recent decision to “re-scope” the issues to be addressed in the hearing itself.

From when TransCanada first conceived this project internally in late 2011, accumulated development costs have exceeded $1 billion, the vast majority relating to the pursuit of regulatory approval. No private sector entity would ever have expended such a vast amount of capital seeking regulatory approval if it had known the dimension of the regulatory and political risk.

The last straw was the re-scoping decision taken by the current NEB panel, and supported by the Trudeau government. This decision concerned whether carbon emissions generated by the production process of the oil to be moved by Energy East were consistent or not with Ottawa’s carbon policy. To be clear, these are not emissions generated by the Energy East pipeline directly, but are emissions TransCanada is not responsible for. The real issue of course is whether incremental crude oil production in Canada is consistent with national carbon policy. That is not an issue to be dealt with by regulators but rather by democratically elected politicians.

Dennis McConaghy was formerly the executive vice-president of pipeline strategy and development at TransCanada Pipelines.

The French Connection in the Sabotage

There is plenty of evidence that Quebecers, collectively, did everything they could to stand in the way of Energy East, which was to cross Quebec territory.

A campaign by the Montreal Metropolitan Community, a regional organization of municipal politicians representing more than 80 area cities and towns, opposed the project on the ground its risks far outweighed its benefits.

Quebec contributed to the regulatory overkill that ultimately sunk the $15.7 billion project. It piled on with its own list of conditions. As Fournier himself puts it in his letter, the province “adopted seven principles to examine the Energy East project, the same principles Ontario adopted, inspired by those of British Columbia.”

Quebec’s hostility to Energy East came in other ways, too. TransCanada had to cancel plans for a second marine terminal for Energy East at Cacouna, Que., to allay community concerns about impact on beluga whales. The NEB hearings on Energy East were suspended after violent protests in Montreal. Eventually the whole review went back to square one and was beefed up to win back public trust. The inclusion of upstream and downstream climate change impacts this summer ultimately became the regulatory overreach that went too far.

Now the Political Climate is Changing

Quebec’s sabotage of Energy East is not surprising considering the two-term Premier joined the province into California’s cap-and-trade scheme. He was also keen to be photographed with Al Gore at the Paris COP. What is new is a parliamentary election on October 1 with the opposition leading in the polls. Meet the man committed to action rather than pipedreams. Source: Globe and Mail. Excerpts in italics.

François Legault, the man who has a serious chance of becoming the next Quebec premier and arguably the most conservative one in at least 50 years, has spent nearly as much time as a professional politician as he did a business executive.

He seems genuinely surprised at the suggestion “businessman” would take second place to “politician” on his résumé. He starts doing the math out loud on what came after he founded Air Transat.

“I started in politics in 1998. I was 41. So that’s 21 years in business, 18 in politics? Remember, I took two years off in there,” he says in an interview, exhaling in relieved self-affirmation. “For me, I’m still more a businessman. I’m more a pragmatic guy. I like economics and finance. Those are the main reasons I’m in politics.”

Mr. Legault is a bit fussy about labels. He doesn’t like to be called a federalist, even if he believes Quebec’s place is within Canada. He wants to limit spending, cut taxes and immigration levels and seriously improve the business environment in Quebec, but denies he’s all that right-wing.

Now, with 10 months until the next election, the 60-year-old Mr. Legault may be on the cusp of getting his hands on some economic levers. Three polls in a row have showed him in first place.

The PQ is polling a distant third and has set aside the promise of a quick sovereignty vote. “At each and every election, the ballot question ends up being on the sovereignty of Quebec,” Mr. Legault says. “For us, it’s clear. Our project is within Canada. This will be the first election in years that the real issue will be a worn-out, corrupt government, not the sovereignty of Quebec.“

Mr. Legault was raised in the western Montreal suburb of Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue where his father was the postmaster and his mother a part-time cashier at the A&P store. He is married and has two sons in their 20s; he says he can still compete with them on the tennis court but “only for about 20 minutes.”

He studied accounting and worked as an auditor and in finance before borrowing $50,000 in 1986 to help found Air Transat. He cashed out with $10-million when he entered politics 12 years later. “The reason I can be independent today is because of business,” he says.

And now from the Montreal Gazette Let’s revisit Energy East and get Canada off Saudi oil  Our limited  capacity to move oil to the east and west coasts is costing us billions, and transferring large chunks of that cash to despots.

Canada’s spat with Saudi Arabia raises an obvious question. Why is Canada, sitting on the world’s third-largest oil reserves, importing some 87,000 barrels of oil per day from Saudi Arabia, a country with a terrible civil rights record?

Saudi Arabia is some 9,625 kilometres from Quebec, where Saudi oil is imported to Canada. Wouldn’t it be nice if Eastern Canada got its oil from a democratic country with an excellent record on civil rights and environmental protection, like, say, Canada? It wouldn’t be hard. A simple pipeline would completely obviate Canada’s need to import oil from the Middle East.

TransCanada’s proposed (now cancelled) Energy East pipeline would have carried Canadian oil over about 4,500 km, using mostly existing pipeline capacity currently used to transport natural gas from Alberta to Ontario and Quebec. With a capacity to carry 1.1 million barrels of oil per day, the pipeline would have dwarfed what Canada imports from Saudi Arabia (not to mention Algeria’s 85,000 barrels per day and Nigeria’s 74,000 barrels per day). So what happened to it?

In October 2017, TransCanada withdrew its application from the National Energy Board (NEB) for the proposed $15.7-billion Energy East and Eastern Mainline pipeline projects — about five months after the NEB announced the government would consider “upstream” and “downstream” greenhouse gas emissions in the project evaluation process. The new rule targets greenhouse gases emitted during oil production (not transportation) and after the oil leaves the pipeline and is refined and consumed (again, nothing to do with oil transportation).

Two studies by the Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI) document the potential benefits of building Energy East. In 2014, CERI estimated the project would generate an additional $34 billion to the GDP, an additional 321,000 one-year/full-time equivalent jobs across Canada in construction and operation, and an additional $7.6 billion in total tax revenues for Canada. In a 2018 report, CERI models the costs and benefits of displacing imported oil with Canadian oil. This “made in Canada” scenario estimates refinery cost-savings of $23 million per year while displacing 100 per cent of foreign oil. CERI also estimates that using Canadian oil rather than imported oil would lower greenhouse gas emissions by 2 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent per year.

In any sane world, Canada, with oil reserves estimated at 171 billion barrels (10 per cent of the world’s total reserves), would not need to import oil from foreign powers with strong records of religious oppression, gender oppression, international destabilization, public beheadings and other activities Canadians shouldn’t support with their oil and gasoline purchases.

Rather than looking at the failure of Energy East, and simplifying (and clarifying) environmental assessment to invite investment in such projects, the Trudeau government took an already onerous and somewhat arbitrary environmental assessment process and made it even more so. The government’s new criteria for energy projects includes consideration of “gender” impacts and use of the “traditional knowledge” of Aboriginal people. Neither of these requirements lends itself to rigorous definition.

Canada’s limited capacity to move oil to the East and West Coast is costing Canadians billions of dollars per year, and transferring large chunks of that money into the hands of despots. Our governments must do whatever’s needed to break Canada’s oil transport bottlenecks.

Aside:  Loading Upstream and Downstream GHG emissions onto Pipeline Environmental Assessments

The was the argument used by Trudeau government to destroy the Energy East pipeline.  The same gambit is used by US activists attempting to prevent pipeline approvals issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).  The article linked below gets into the details, but traditionally a project such as constructing a pipeline was assessed on the environmental impact of its installation and operation.  Climatists have pushed and in instances succeeded in arguing that the fuels flowing through the pipeline cause climate change by emissions generated in the production beforehand and consumption by end users and must be estimated before approving.

During the Obama administration FERC with majority Democratic appointees blocked pipelines on this basis.  But now majority Republican appointees are taking the traditional more narrow scope, leaving out GHG calculations before and after transport along with Social Cost of Carbon (SCC).  In fact, FERC has no jurisdiction to regulate sites producing or burning fossil fuel products  The legal pushback is strenuous as noted in this article from The Legal Intelligencer FERC’s Hard Look at Pipeline Construction and GHG Emissions.

Summary

Winds of energy pragmatism are starting, but whether they can blow down the believers’ house of cards remains to be seen.  “The Force is Strong in Them,”  unfortunately.

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna with Justin Trudeau in the choir.

Highlights of EPA’s Affordable Clean Energy Rule (ACE)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

With 60 days for public comment before the rule goes into force, expect a lot of howling from those who wanted the Clean Power Plan despite its illegality (why the Supremes stopped it). Here are some excerpts from the overview in Powermag intended to inform energy providers. Trump Emissions Plan Aims to Boost Coal-Fired Power

What Coal Generators Should Know About the EPA’s Proposed ACE Rule

The EPA, in an impact analysis of the Trump plan reviewed by The Washington Post, said the plan would affect more than 300 U.S. power plants and provide operators with incentives to keep coal plants operating rather than replacing them with natural gas or renewable energy projects.

The agency also has acknowledged the rule likely will lead to an increase in airborne pollutants that could contribute to health issues, although EPA officials have said other regulations are in place to handle those.

Mandy Gunasekara, principal deputy assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said the new rule would require states to submit their plans to the EPA for regulating power plants over a three-year period after the proposal is finalized, which is expected next year. It specifically asks for “patterns of performance” for existing coal plants. The EPA would then have one year to determine whether a state’s plan is sufficient. If the EPA determines it is not, the agency would then design a plan for that state, according to Gunasekara.

“Instead of [the federal government] putting out a strict standard of performance, we’re allowing the states to determine that strict standard of performance,” Gunasekara told the MEGA audience, including POWER. “No two coal plants are the same. It should be up to the states to ensure that everyone has access to reliable and affordable energy in that state.”

Source: 2017 EIA statistics.

‘Ensure Coal Has a Place on the Grid’

Replacing the CPP has been one of Trump’s priorities. “The president has constantly recognized the importance of coal,” said Steven Winberg, assistant secretary of fossil energy for the DOE, who also spoke Tuesday morning at MEGA. “We need to ensure that coal has a place on the grid.”

Said Winberg: “We need to get moving on the next generation of coal plants that are cleaner, more efficient, and have a small footprint. We’re looking at 50-to-350-MW plants that are much more efficient. And they need to be able to ‘load follow’ due to the increased amount of intermittent power [mostly wind and solar] coming onto the grid. Coal plants have traditionally [provided] baseload power, and new plants need to be able to load follow.”

Gunasekara said the ACE rule is really “presenting guidelines for states to address CO2 from coal plants. States can determine the best system for emissions reduction.” She said the plan is designed to encourage coal plant operators to focus on “heat rate efficiency improvements,” and decide “whether a technology works, or whether it doesn’t.”

EPA Sticking to Endangerment Finding

EPA Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation Bill Wehrum told reporters in a press briefing on August 21 that the ACE rule “is a regulation of GHGs, no doubt about it.” But the rule seeks to bring the EPA back to its “core function” of regulating emissions from “things that emit—in this case power plants—and not regulate other aspects of the industry like the electricity grid.” He added: “So we are not regulating dispatch of power plants, we are not trying to impose a requirement to implement renewable energy resources. Those are things the Clean Power Plan did.”

However, with the ACE rule, the EPA also isn’t proposing to rescind the “endangerment finding,” in which the Obama-era EPA found GHGs are a danger to public health and welfare, Wehrum said. “We’re not proposing to find that power plants do not contribute to come to that endangerment. We are proposing, though, to revise [the Clean Power Plan] to bring it back within the legal authority that we have under the Clean Air Act,” Wehrum said.

Asked whether combating climate change is a priority for the EPA, Wehrum said that Congress “made the decision for us under this part of the Clean Air Act.” But Congress also said that states have primary authority for regulating their emissions. “So we have a responsibility to set up a framework; states have a responsibility to regulate, and Congress gave states a lot of latitude to decide what it is they’re going to do. And so we are faithfully implementing the law this way.”

Coal groups have been vocal in their support of the administration’s effort. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a trade group representing coal producers, earlier this year said, “The CPP is illegal because the rule greatly exceeds EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil-fueled power plants under section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act. Even if the CPP were determined to be lawful (which it is not), it would establish bad environmental policy that would have substantial adverse energy and economic impacts.”

Michelle Bloodworth, who was named the new president and CEO of the ACCCE in July, told the Times: “I certainly think we are supportive of what the administration is doing and we applaud their efforts.”

Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, also applauded the president’s plan, saying in a statement: “The Clean Power Plan (CPP) grew EPA power in unprecedented and harmful ways, marking a clear deviation from the agency’s traditional role by grossly misapplying the Clean Air Act. The ‘Affordable Clean Energy Rule’ proposed by the Trump Administration corrects some of the CPP’s worst flaws. By reining in the EPA, the ‘Affordable Clean Energy’ rule limits the negative economic impacts a back door federal renewable mandate would have on American families. However, we still maintain that only a full repeal of the Obama era regulation will fully protect ratepayers.”

Environmentalists attacked the new proposal from all sides. Lissa Lynch, staff attorney for federal policy in the Climate & Clean Energy Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said: “The Clean Power Plan replacement proposed today by Acting EPA Administrator [Andrew] Wheeler demonstrates the Trump EPA’s unflagging commitment to propping up polluters. The proposal is designed to require power plants to do nothing to reduce their carbon pollution, and it could even result in greater climate-polluting emissions – a worse than do-nothing replacement for the Clean Power Plan.

Winberg, though, countered that argument, saying coal remains important to the U.S. He said the nation must focus on “upgrading the coal fleet, transforming technology, and reducing the cost of CO2.” He acknowledged the nation “has an aging coal fleet, and we need to do something about that. Coal is going to be part of the U.S. energy mix for decades to come. Boosting U.S. energy production is important for national security, and we are seeing a new focus on policies that level the playing field for coal.”

Footnote:

The ACE plan was well received by CAGW (Citizens Against Government Waste)

Citizens Against Government Waste Applauds EPA Affordable Clean Energy Plan  August 22, 2018

WASHINGTON: Today, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) applauded the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for proposing the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule. The rule would reverse the Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan, which was blocked by the Supreme Court in 2016 due to regulatory overreach.

Full text of proposed EPA rule:  Emission Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Existing Electric Utility Generating Units

See also the world context regarding coal power Climate Change Battle Report

Climate Change Battle Report

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Anyone paying attention knows this summer the media has assaulted the public with many climate scares, both old and new. Each week we see new ones like “marine heat waves” added to threats that 2018 summer temperatures will be repeated and increased until 2022. All sorts of dire consequences are proclaimed, and for what purpose? It can only be the intent to recruit us to join the “fight against climate change.”

Curious as to what jurisdictions might be doing, I went searching for news about actions to strike blows against the climate change nemesis. Media headlines frequently announce that this or that nation, province or city is stepping up to “Fight Climate Change.”  The results are informative.

What Actions Count as Fighting Climate Change

For example a report Ireland will raise carbon tax to tackle climate change. In the text it is announced the nation is not reducing emissions on schedule, and is taking three actions: Setting and raising a tax on carbon, spending more on fuel efficiencies, renewables and climate adaptation projects, and divesting from fossil fuel companies.

Then there is an article Mexico and Canada Join Growing Under2 Climate Coalition  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The growing Under2 Coalition is a global pact of cities, states and countries pledging to limit the increase in global average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius, the level of potentially catastrophic consequences.

With Canada and Mexico’s endorsements, the Under2 Coalition now includes 170 jurisdictions on six continents that collectively represent more than 1.18 billion people and $27.5 trillion GDP – equivalent to 16 percent of the global population and 37 percent of the global economy.

“The governments in the Under2 coalition, like California, are leading the fight against climate change. They know that investing in clean growth will help all members reach their ambitious climate change goals and grow their countries’ economies. I applaud their leadership in reducing emissions and supporting clean innovation. Canada is proud to endorse their actions today,” said Minister McKenna.

Coalition members pledge to limit greenhouse gas emissions to 2 tons per capita or 80-95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

This action builds on landmark legislation Governor Brown signed in October 2015 to generate half of the state’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and double the rate of energy efficiency savings in California buildings. Governor Brown has also committed to reducing today’s petroleum use in cars and trucks by up to 50 percent within the next 15 years; make heating fuels cleaner; and manage farm and rangelands, forests and wetlands so they can store carbon.

What is the Climate Battleground

Some of these actions are purely symbolic virtue signaling and will have no effect on either CO2 emissions or global warming. Divestment for example is a transfer of shares to other investors with no impact upon the value of the target companies. The virtue is not free, in that the portfolio loses diversity (energy being counter cyclical to other businesses), and other industries often generate lower returns. And if the reinvestment is into renewables, those companies’ performance depends on government subsidies that are presently being withdrawn. Another sham is purchasing carbon free electricity credits from a grid mostly supplied by coal and gas plants.

In short there seem actually to be Three Lines of Attack
1.Adaptation and Resilience
2.Improving Energy Efficiencies
3.Transition to Zero Carbon Energy

The first two are worthy initiatives. History proves that future periods are likely to be both colder and warmer than the present, and cold times are the greater threat to human life and prosperity. Prudent public officials should invest in robust infrastructure and reliable, affordable energy. The rub is powering a modern society with windmills and solar panels.

How Goes the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels

The first objective in the Great Green Transition is to stop the use of Coal, Climate Enemy #1. An update report on that front comes from Vijay Jayaraj, Aug 18, 2018, at Townhall The Dawn of Climate Realism: Coal Surges Amid Climate Rhetoric  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Many countries have been at the crisscross of warfare between anti-coal establishments and the traditional coal industry. Despite the elite-empowered and politically motivated worldwide campaign to phase out coal, demand for coal is on the rise!

Coal has been “enemy No. 1” for the climate establishment. In fact, it would seem that the entire global warming movement is hinged upon the singular aim to eliminate coal from use.

Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) is a notion that cites a popular scientific hypothesis and concludes that the global temperatures have risen, or will soon rise, to dangerous levels in the post-industrialized era due to human activity.

The proponents of CAGW believe that the primary contributor to this increase in temperature is the combustion of coal and the subsequent release of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere.

However, peer-reviewed scientific journals by hundreds of scientists render many of these claims dubious at best. Here are just three of them.

Firstly, contrary to the claim that carbon dioxide is the primary driver of global warming, global temperatures have not risen proportionately to carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. In other words, an increase in carbon dioxide emission has not resulted in an increase in temperature.

Secondly, most of the current “consensus” on climate change is based on forecasts from computer climate models. But the wide divergence between observed temperature and model predictions makes it apparent that the models were programmed incorrectly to be over-dependent on carbon dioxide concentration to predict temperature changes.

In what was a major embarrassment to United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), top climate scientists admitted these flaws in the climate models when they failed to reflect real-world temperatures during the last 19 years. The same was widely publicized and even testified to the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space & Technology.

Thirdly, contrary to the claim that recent warming is historically unprecedented, today’s temperature levels are similar to the temperatures the earth experienced in the first and eleventh centuries. Also known as Roman Warm Period and Medieval Warm Period, these were times when, though as warm as today or warmer, the earth’s ecosystems flourished. The notion that “today’s temperature levels are at unprecedented levels” is completely false.

Despite these (and many more) straight-forward evidences against the CAGW hypothesis, the climate establishment continues to advocate for the ban of coal and coal-fired power plants. Global climate treaties like the Paris Agreement were set out to target and close down coal plants in developing countries.

But to their surprise, coal use is rising.

This financial year, Coal India—India’s largest state-controlled coal mining company—saw its first-quarter profits jump 61 percent and its coal production rise 15.23 percent. India has a long-term vision to increase its coal output and has been vocal about “carbon imperialism”—a term it uses to define the attitude of the anti-coal climate establishment.

In 2017, coal accounted for 60.4 percent of total energy consumption in China. The country’s coal production outputs for the first seven months of 2018 was 1.98 billion tons, 3.4 percent higher than the same period last year. China’s coal imports surged this July and hit a record high (29 million tons), beating the previous highest recorded monthly volume import (January 2014).

But the surge in coal is not just limited to Asia.

Russia’s coal production of 410 million tons was its highest since the Soviet era and is expected to reach 420 million tons this year. The coal industry is set to expand in the coming years with massive infrastructure upgrades.

U.S. coal output reached a 16-year high in 2017 (701 million tons), after a change in leadership that saw the lifting of heavy restrictions on coal from the previous administration. Coal output in 2017 was 40.8 million tons higher than in 2016, and India was the top importer of U.S. coal in Asia (13 million tons).

The trend continued in 2018, and the month of April recorded the highest coal export in five years. U.S exports to India reached 6.2 million tons in just the first half of 2018, which is nearly the entire export (6.8m tons) to India in 2017! And coal is expected to do fairly well in the U.S. despite the disruption from the natural gas boom.

The situations for coal in India, China, and the U.S. are prime examples of the coal industry’s strength. It can also be said that the climate rhetoric has failed to break the world’s dependence on coal. And for good reason. Coal remains among the cheapest, and technically simplest, sources of the abundant, affordable, reliable electricity indispensable to the modern industry and technology that are indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty.

Leaders across the globe understand the indispensable role of coal in their economies. They are also beginning to understand the exaggerated nature of climate-change dangers promoted heavily in the mainstream media.

The climate establishment’s doomsday prophecies failed to come true in the last 20 years, which saw global temperature remain largely stable. Arctic ice remained stable, global agricultural outputs increased, more people rose out of poverty, and the forests in Europe grew instead of shrinking.

Clearly, there is no reason why the coal industry should slow down, and it won’t. Overblown climate-change rhetoric is leading rapidly to the downfall of the climate establishment, and nations are moving past it at a rapid pace.

Postscript:

Methane Waste Prevention Circus

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Circus

In the middle ages, theologians strenuously debated the number of angels dancing on a pinhead. Now we have lawyers and judges going around in circles in order to prevent methane emissions. This circus show is a direct result of the embedded green bureaucracy in government, together with a segment of the population mobilized by fear of global warming/climate change.

The courtroom drama started when the Obama administration in its midnight hours gave environmentalists a Christmas gift with a new Methane Waste Prevention Rule issued by BLM (Bureau of Land Management). It demonstrated how federal agencies were enslaved by green ideologues in order to choke any energy developments with a slew of regulations and penalities. In fact, folks like the EDF (Environmental Defense Fund) are traumatized by fear of “greenhouse gases”, and methane in particular. Their real mission is to keep fossil fuels in the ground, thereby securing an imaginary future where the climate is always favorable and never changes.

This hysteria has been deliberately instilled and maintained by climatists (alarmists/activists) and produces a circus whenever they feel threatened (which is often). This is a case in point, and a cautionary tale for anyone trying to reconcile conservation and development.

Aside: In 1978 Billy Martin was Manager of the New York Yankees baseball team during a particularly turbulent time with players, coaches, the owner and fans. The Yankees were known by the NYC borough housing their stadium; overnight they went from the “Bronx Bombers” to the “Bronx Zoo.” The long-running soap opera prompted this comment from third baseman Graig Nettles: “When I was a kid I wanted to be either a ball player or work in a circus. Now I get to do both!”

Harvard Law School has a record of the series of acts in this soap opera here Methane Waste Prevention Rule

The schedule of Acts in the Methane Waste Prevention Circus (synopsis only; details at linked website)

History Before Trump Era (BTE)
On November 18, 2016 BLM published the Waste Prevention Rule with an effective date of January 17, 2017 and additional compliance deadlines set for January 17, 2018.

Three days before publication (November 15, 2016), but after the rule was signed, industry and states filed challenges to the rule in the District of Wyoming.

On January 17, 2017 the District of Wyoming denied a request for a preliminary injunction (leaving the rule in effect during the litigation).

Trump Common Era (TCE)
On February 3, 2017 The US House of Representatives passed a Congressional Review Act resolution to disapprove the rule, which would have voided the rule and barred any other “substantially similar” rule in the future.

On March 28, 2017 President Trump’s Executive Order on Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth directed the BLM to review the rule.

On May 10, 2017 the US Senate voted down the House of Representatives’ Congressional Review Act resolution, with three Republicans voting no.

On June 15, 2017 BLM announced that it was postponing the 2018 compliance dates for an indefinite period of time (as long as litigation is pending), “pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act” in a notification in the Federal Register.

On July 5, 2017 California and New Mexico challenged BLM’s postponement of the compliance dates.

On July 10, 2017 several environmental groups also challenged BLM’s postponement. The Northern District of California granted a motion to relate these two cases on July 12, 2017 and North Dakota and several industry groups were later allowed to intervene in the consolidated cases.

On September 7, 2017 the Northern District of California denied a request to transfer the litigation challenging BLM’s postponement to the District of Wyoming.

On October 4, 2017 the Northern District of California determined BLM’s June 15, 2017 postponement was unlawful, granting summary judgment in the case that vacated the postponement notification and reinstated the rule’s January 17, 2018 compliance date.

Also on October 4, 2017 BLM proposed a rule to delay the 2018 compliance dates in the Obama-era rule until January 17th, 2019. The agency accepted comments until November 6, 2017.

On October 27, 2017 industry groups asked the District of Wyoming to issue a preliminary injunction on the rule’s January, 2018 compliance deadlines to keep them from going into force while litigation is pending.

On October 30, 2017 the District of Wyoming agreed to a Trump administration request to slow the litigation by postponing briefing deadlines as BLM goes through its rulemaking process to repeal, revise, or rescind the rule pursuant to Executive Order 13783.

On November 2, 2017 Democratic lawmakers wrote a letter to Secretary Zinke opposing BLM’s attempts to repeal, revise, or rescind the rule.

In the last week of November 2017 environmental groups filed briefing with the District of Wyoming opposing the industry groups’ October 27, 2017 preliminary injunction request.

On December 4, 2017 BLM filed a notice of appeal to the Ninth Circuit of the October 4, 2017 Northern District of California decision finding the June 2017 BLM delay unlawful.

On December 8, 2017 BLM published a final rule delaying the 2018 compliance dates until 2019. Often referred to as the “Suspension Rule,” this was the final version of the rule BLM proposed on October 4, 2017.

On December 19, 2017 New Mexico and California sued BLM over its December 8, 2017 final rule to suspend the methane rule’s 2018 compliance dates, delaying them until 2019. A coalition of environmental groups also sued over the December 8 rule. Both lawsuits were filed in the District Court for the Northern District of California and were consolidated in January 2018.

On December 29, 2017, the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming granted a request from industry groups and Wyoming and Montana to stay litigation in light of the final Suspension Rule BLM issued on December 8, 2017.

On January 5, 2018 the American Petroleum Institute moved to intervene in the December 19 lawsuits in the Northern District of California, saying the rule would be economically damaging. On January 9, 2018 the states of North Dakota and Texas also moved to intervene on behalf of BLM. Both of these motions were granted on February 26, 2018.

In the week of February 12, 2018 BLM released a proposed rule (the Revision Rule) to replace the 2016 Waste Prevention Rule.

On February 22, 2018 the Northern District of California issued a preliminary injunction preventing BLM’s December 8, 2017 Suspension Rule from taking effect. This order also denied a January 9th request by BLM, North Dakota and Texas to transfer the case to the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming.

On March 7, 2018 U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming agreed to resume industry and state challenges to the rule, lifting a stay issued on December 29, 2017 and setting a briefing schedule for pending motions.

Also on March 14, 2018 BLM announced it would voluntarily dismiss its appeal to the Ninth Circuit of the October 4, 2017 ruling from the Northern District of California, finding BLM had violated the Administrative Procedure Act by postponing 2018 compliance dates. The Ninth Circuit granted its motion to dismiss on March 15, 2018, ending the substantive portion of this case.

On April 4, 2018 the US District Court for the District of Wyoming agreed to suspend key provisions of the Waste Prevention Rule. The court stayed the case pending BLM’s completion of rulemaking process for the Revision Rule.

On April 5th and 6th, 2018 California, New Mexico, and environmental groups filed notices of appeal to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals of District of Wyoming’s April 4, 2018 order staying implementation of provisions of the Waste Prevention Rule.

On April 23, 2018 BLM filed a notice of appeal to the Ninth Circuit of the February 22, 2018 order denying a motion to transfer venue and granting a preliminary junction.

On April 30, 2018 the District of Wyoming denied appellants’ April 6, 2018 motion to stay its April 4th decision. By denying the motion, the court left in place its suspension of key provisions of the rule and stay of the case pending completion of the regulatory process for the Revision Rule.

On May 11, 2018 Environmental Defense Fund sued Interior and BLM for BLM’s failure to respond to FOIA requests “to produce records relevant to efforts to suspend, delay, repeal and/or revise the Waste Prevention, Production Subject to Royalties, and Resource Conservation final rule.”

On June 4, 2018 the Tenth Circuit denied a request from California, New Mexico and environmental groups to stay the April 4th order of the District of Wyoming (suspending key portions of the rule and staying litigation at the district court level) pending the Tenth Circuit’s consideration of their appeal of the order. In the same ruling, the Tenth Circuit also denied Wyoming, Montana, and industry groups’ motion to dismiss the appeal of the April 4th order entirely.

On June 20, 2018 BLM filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss its appeal to the Ninth Circuit filed on April 23, 2018. This leaves in place the February 22, 2018 preliminary injunction of BLM’s Suspension Rule.

On July 30, 2018, environmental groups, California, and New Mexico filed a brief with the 10th Circuit asking the court to overturn the District Court’s decision to enjoin the Methane Waste Prevention Rule.

Currently Running Methane Circus Performances

Four cases related to the Waste Prevention Rule and the Administration’s efforts to delay, suspend, or roll it back are currently active:

  • Wyoming v. U.S. Dep’t of the Interior, No. 2:16-CV-00285 consolidated with Western Energy Alliance, et al. v. Sally Jewell, 2:16-CV-0280. (D. Wyo.) — challenging the original Waste Prevention Rule,
  • California and New Mexico v. Zinke, No. 3:17-CV-03804 consolidated with Sierra Club et al., v. Zinke. No. 3:17-CV-03885 (N.D. Cal.) — challenging BLM’s June 15, 2017 notification of postponement of the rule’s compliance dates,
  • California and New Mexico v. BLM, No .3:17-cv-07186 consolidated with Sierra Club et al v. BLM 3:17-cv-07187 (N.D. Cal.) — challenging BLMs December 8, 2017 Suspension Rule delaying the Waste Prevention Rule’s 2018 compliance dates, and
  • EDF v. Dept. of Interior, No. 1:18-cv-01116 (D.D.C) -– a FOIA suit against BLM regarding requested documents relating to its efforts to delay, suspend, and rollback the Waste Prevention Rule.

I searched a lot to find out what is the root of the legal conflict. Almost everything in the media is from alarmist sources and avoids the details and differences between what is proposed in 2016 and 2018. The most informative source IMO is the legal brief submitted by the energy producers April 23, 2018 Comments on BLM 2018 Revisions to Waste Prevention Rules Excerpts below in italics with my bolds.

To Whom it May Concern: Western Energy Alliance (the Alliance) and the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) appreciate the opportunity to provide comments on the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) proposed revisions of certain provisions of the Methane and Waste Prevention rule, or 2016 rule. The 2016 rule as promulgated exceeded BLM’s authority under the Mineral Leasing Act (MLA), and that the decision to re-evaluate the rule is required. The proposed revision rule more accurately captures the scope of BLM’s waste minimization authority, and will better ensure federal mineral interests are adequately protected without excessively burdening federal lands development with overreaching regulations.

IPAA represents thousands of independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies, as well as the service and supply industries that support their efforts. Independent producers drill about 95% of American oil and natural gas wells, and produce about 54% of American oil and more than 85% of American natural gas. The Alliance represents over 300 companies engaged in all aspects of environmentally responsible exploration and production of oil and natural gas in the West. Alliance members are independents, the majority of which are small businesses with an average of 15 employees.

The 2016 Waste Prevention Rule Exceeds BLM’s Statutory Authority

The 2016 rule exceeds BLM’s statutory authority under the MLA and must be revised. The United States District Court for the District of Wyoming expressed significant concern with the rule. The court described BLM as having “hijacked the EPA’s authority under the guise of waste management” and stated that “the BLM cannot use overlap to justify overreach.”1 Given such a strong warning of the legal vulnerability of the rule, it is logical and necessary that BLM move to substantively revise it to more accurately reflect the agency’s statutory authority. Our comments on the 2016 rule, which are attached hereto as Appendix B and reincorporated in full by reference herein, provide an overview of our concerns with the technical and legal vulnerabilities of the 2016 rule. Many of those concerns went unaddressed and are subject to the ongoing litigation referenced above. This letter raises further concerns with the 2016 rule.

The stated primary goal of the 2016 rule was to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas operations. During that rulemaking process, BLM repeatedly emphasized that the methane reductions achieved by the Proposed Rule justified its provisions. As the Wyoming court noted, however, BLM only has “authority to regulate the development of federal and Indian oil and gas resources for the prevention of waste.” Id. at 15 (emphasis in original). Therefore, some emissions reductions may occur as a result of an otherwise lawful measure to prevent the “waste” of gas pursuant to BLM’s authority under the MLA. But BLM’s obligation to promulgate reasonable waste prevention measures does not confer any authority to regulate air quality. The Wyoming court also made clear that the “protection of air quality . . . is expressly within the ‘substantive field’ of EPA and states pursuant to the Clean Air Act.” Thus, in the context of the 2016 rule, BLM lacks authority to require the oil and gas industry to reduce methane (or other air) emissions.

The only way BLM could justify the 2016 rule was to incorporate global climate change benefits. As the Wyoming court put it, “the Rule only results in a ‘net benefit’ if the ‘social cost of methane’ is allowed to be factored into the analysis . . . [and] [t]he Court questions whether the ‘social cost of methane’ is an appropriate factor for BLM to consider in promulgating a resource conservation rule pursuant to its MLA authority.”The social cost of methane was formally withdrawn by Executive Order No. 13783, Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth, meaning it is no longer a suitable metric for rulemaking.

Under the MLA, produced gas is “wasted” only if it could have been economically captured and marketed or put to beneficial use on the lease. Thus, to establish that a proposed waste prevention measure is a “reasonable precaution” against “waste” and authorized under the MLA, BLM must demonstrate that the gas can be economically captured by the operator or beneficially used on the lease. If a waste prevention measure renders gas capture or use uneconomic, then BLM has no authority to impose it.

The reality is that without duplicative and burdensome federal rules, industry has made tremendous progress in addressing issues associated with venting, flaring, and methane emissions. According to EPA’s most recent greenhouse gas inventory, between 1990 and 2016, methane emissions from petroleum and natural gas systems declined 14% while natural gas production increased 50%. In the 2016 inventory (published in 2018), petroleum system methane emissions declined 3% since 1990, and methane from natural gas systems declined 16% since 1990. These decreases come despite a 71% and 48% increase in production, respectively, since 2005. Most important, the most recent EPA data, which applies more accurate calculation methodologies, show that emissions from associated gas venting and flaring decreased 36% from 2015-2016. See 2018 GHG Inventory Report at 3-64. In fact, EPA revised petroleum system methane emission estimates going back to 1990, resulting in an average decrease of 28% for a given year relative to previous estimates due to the “recalculation of associated gas venting and flaring emissions using a basin-level approach.” Id. at ES-6 (the same recalculation results in increased CO2, however). EPA’s new data reveals that the 2016 rule was premised on inaccurate information regarding the volume of methane emissions attributable to venting and flaring, and is therefore, an arbitrary and capricious agency action that was premised on faulty logic and without adequate support on the record. EPA’s new and updated data further supports the agency’s rationale for the Proposed Rule.

Conclusion

In closing, we reiterate the tremendous progress that America’s oil and natural gas industry has made, and will continue to make, in addressing venting, flaring, and methane emissions. EPA’s most recent data concerning such emissions demonstrates that despite a significant increase in production in recent years, emissions continue to decline, including specifically methane emissions from venting and flaring. In this respect, the fundamental premise upon which the 2016 rule was based is not accurate and warrants a reconsideration of the rule. The 2016 rule exceeded BLM’s authority, made numerous and fundamentally flawed assumptions in its assessment of both the cost of compliance to industry and the benefits derived from the rule, and was an unlawful, arbitrary and capricious agency action. Accordingly, BLM was required to make substantial revisions to that rule, and we believe the Proposed Rule is a vast improvement and consistent with the agency’s statutory authority in most respects.

Footnote:

This is another example of using regulations and legal techniques to add layers of complication and cost with the intent of stopping energy extraction:  “Leave it in the ground.” A previous post showed how this is an activist strategy with deep commitment and deep pockets supporting it.  Just look how quickly legal teams acted to obstruct a more balanced rule, and put sand in the gears of deregulation.  In fact a circus should be more fun instead of a  continual battleground with slings and arrows.

Battle of Agincourt.

Background

Methane Gets a Bad Rap  More Methane Madness

Methane is Natural not Pollution Carbon Sense and Nonsense

Game Plan against Fossil Fuels Climatist Revolutionaries

Note:   Here is the proposed rule:
A Proposed Rule by the Land Management Bureau on 02/22/2018

Halting Failed Auto Fuel Standards

Posted on by Ron Clutz

There are deeper reasons why US auto fuel efficiency standards are and should be rolled back.  They were instituted in denial of regulatory experience and science.  First, a parallel from physics.

In the sub-atomic domain of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist, determined that our observations have an effect on the behavior of quanta (quantum particles).

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that it is impossible to know simultaneously the exact position and momentum of a particle. That is, the more exactly the position is determined, the less known the momentum, and vice versa. This principle is not a statement about the limits of technology, but a fundamental limit on what can be known about a particle at any given moment. This uncertainty arises because the act of measuring affects the object being measured. The only way to measure the position of something is using light, but, on the sub-atomic scale, the interaction of the light with the object inevitably changes the object’s position and its direction of travel.

Now skip to the world of governance and the effects of regulation. A similar finding shows that the act of regulating produces reactive behavior and unintended consequences contrary to the desired outcomes.

US Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards Have Backfired

An article at Financial Times explains about Energy Regulations Unintended Consequences  Excerpts below with my bolds.

Goodhart’s Law holds that “any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes”. Originally coined by the economist Charles Goodhart as a critique of the use of money supply measures to guide monetary policy, it has been adopted as a useful concept in many other fields. The general principle is that when any measure is used as a target for policy, it becomes unreliable. It is an observable phenomenon in healthcare, in financial regulation and, it seems, in energy efficiency standards.

When governments set efficiency regulations such as the US Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for vehicles, they are often what is called “attribute-based”, meaning that the rules take other characteristics into consideration when determining compliance. The Cafe standards, for example, vary according to the “footprint” of the vehicle: the area enclosed by its wheels. In Japan, fuel economy standards are weight-based. Like all regulations, fuel economy standards create incentives to game the system, and where attributes are important, that can mean finding ways to exploit the variations in requirements. There have long been suspicions that the footprint-based Cafe standards would encourage manufacturers to make larger cars for the US market, but a paper this week from Koichiro Ito of the University of Chicago and James Sallee of the University of California Berkeley provided the strongest evidence yet that those fears are likely to be justified.

Mr Ito and Mr Sallee looked at Japan’s experience with weight-based fuel economy standards, which changed in 2009, and concluded that “the Japanese car market has experienced a notable increase in weight in response to attribute-based regulation”. In the US, the Cafe standards create a similar pressure, but expressed in terms of size rather than weight. Mr Ito suggested that in Ford’s decision to end almost all car production in North America to focus on SUVs and trucks, “policy plays a substantial role”. It is not just that manufacturers are focusing on larger models; specific models are also getting bigger. Ford’s move, Mr Ito wrote, should be seen as an “alarm bell” warning of the flaws in the Cafe system. He suggests an alternative framework with a uniform standard and tradeable credits, as a more effective and lower-cost option. With the Trump administration now reviewing fuel economy and emissions standards, and facing challenges from California and many other states, the vehicle manufacturers appear to be in a state of confusion. An elegant idea for preserving plans for improving fuel economy while reducing the cost of compliance could be very welcome.

The paper is The Economics of Attribute-Based Regulation: Theory and Evidence from Fuel-Economy Standards Koichiro Ito, James M. Sallee NBER Working Paper No. 20500.  The authors explain:

An attribute-based regulation is a regulation that aims to change one characteristic of a product related to the externality (the “targeted characteristic”), but which takes some other characteristic (the “secondary attribute”) into consideration when determining compliance. For example, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in the United States recently adopted attribute-basing. Figure 1 shows that the new policy mandates a fuel-economy target that is a downward-sloping function of vehicle “footprint”—the square area trapped by a rectangle drawn to connect the vehicle’s tires.  Under this schedule, firms that make larger vehicles are allowed to have lower fuel economy. This has the potential benefit of harmonizing marginal costs of regulatory compliance across firms, but it also creates a distortionary incentive for automakers to manipulate vehicle footprint.

Attribute-basing is used in a variety of important economic policies. Fuel-economy regulations are attribute-based in China, Europe, Japan and the United States, which are the world’s four largest car markets. Energy efficiency standards for appliances, which allow larger products to consume more energy, are attribute-based all over the world. Regulations such as the Clean Air Act, the Family Medical Leave Act, and the Affordable Care Act are attribute-based because they exempt some firms based on size. In all of these examples, attribute-basing is designed to provide a weaker regulation for products or firms that will find compliance more difficult.

Summary from Heritage Foundation study Fuel Economy Standards Are a Costly Mistake Excerpt with my bolds.

The CAFE standards are not only an extremely inefficient way to reduce carbon dioxide emission but will also have a variety of unintended consequences.

For example, the post-2010 standards apply lower mileage requirements to vehicles with larger footprints. Thus, Whitefoot and Skerlos argued that there is an incentive to increase the size of vehicles.

Data from the first few years under the new standard confirm that the average footprint, weight, and horsepower of cars and trucks have indeed all increased since 2008, even as carbon emissions fell, reflecting the distorted incentives.

Manufacturers have found work-arounds to thwart the intent of the regulations. For example, the standards raised the price of large cars, such as station wagons, relative to light trucks. As a result, automakers created a new type of light truck—the sport utility vehicle (SUV)—which was covered by the lower standard and had low gas mileage but met consumers’ needs. Other automakers have simply chosen to miss the thresholds and pay fines on a sliding scale.

Another well-known flaw in CAFE standards is the “rebound effect.” When consumers are forced to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles, the cost per mile falls (since their cars use less gas) and they drive more. This offsets part of the fuel economy gain and adds congestion and road repair costs. Similarly, the rising price of new vehicles causes consumers to delay upgrades, leaving older vehicles on the road longer.

In addition, the higher purchase price of cars under a stricter CAFE standard is likely to force millions of households out of the new-car market altogether. Many households face credit constraints when borrowing money to purchase a car. David Wagner, Paulina Nusinovich, and Esteban Plaza-Jennings used Bureau of Labor Statistics data and typical finance industry debt-service-to-income ratios and estimated that 3.1 million to 14.9 million households would not have enough credit to purchase a new car under the 2025 CAFE standards.[34] This impact would fall disproportionately on poorer households and force the use of older cars with higher maintenance costs and with fuel economy that is generally lower than that of new cars.

CAFE standards may also have redistributed corporate profits to foreign automakers and away from Ford, General Motors (GM), and Chrysler (the Big Three), because foreign-headquartered firms tend to specialize in vehicles that are favored under the new standards.[35] 

Conclusion

CAFE standards are costly, inefficient, and ineffective regulations. They severely limit consumers’ ability to make their own choices concerning safety, comfort, affordability, and efficiency. Originally based on the belief that consumers undervalued fuel economy, the standards have morphed into climate control mandates. Under any justification, regulation gives the desires of government regulators precedence over those of the Americans who actually pay for the cars. Since the regulators undervalue the well-being of American consumers, the policy outcomes are predictably harmful.

 

Kavanaugh’s EPA Opinions Already Endorsed by Supremes

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Adam J. White wrote in Real Clear Policy July 31, 2018 Brett Kavanaugh’s Past Opinions Endorsed by Supreme Court  Excerpts below in italics with my bolds.

If all goes according to plan, Brett Kavanaugh will soon join the Supreme Court. But his ideas arrived at the Court well before him.

For 12 years, Judge Kavanaugh has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, often considered the “second-highest court in the land” because of its heavy portion of constitutional and regulatory cases. On those issues, Kavanaugh has become the intellectual leader of his generation of judges on the lower courts. And the best evidence of this are those cases in which Judge Kavanaugh’s analysis was adopted by the Supreme Court even after Kavanaugh’s colleagues on the D.C. Circuit rejected it.

Through eloquent judicial opinions and nuanced law review articles, Kavanaugh has challenged, in particular, today’s increasingly unaccountable administrative state. His uncanny ability to identify fundamental threats to our Constitution’s republican institutions, and to anticipate the Supreme Court’s own eventual response, is exemplified by three cases.

The first involved so-called “independent” agencies. Since the New Deal, the Supreme Court has recognized Congress’s discretion to create agencies with a measure of insulation against day-to-day presidential control. But when Congress attempted to layer one independent agency within another — i.e., the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s creation of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, inside the SEC — Kavanaugh recognized that a line must be drawn.

“By restricting the President’s authority over the Board,” he wrote in a 2008 case, “the Act renders this Executive Branch agency unaccountable and divorced from Presidential control to a degree not previously countenanced in our constitutional structure.” Recognizing that “upholding the PCAOB here would green-light Congress to create a host of similar entities,” Kavanaugh dissented from his colleagues’ decision affirming the agency. The Supreme Court then reversed the D.C. Circuit, largely adopting Kavanaugh’s approach.

The second case involved an agency’s assertion of immense power in lieu of — or even contrary to — the laws enacted by Congress. When the Environmental Protection Agency imposed its initial suite of regulations for greenhouse gas emissions, the agency attempted to “tailor” the Clean Air Act to suit its climate policy. The EPA recognized that applying various parts of the Act to GHG emissions would lead to “absurd” results that Congress specifically sought to avoid when it created the Act in the first place. So the agency attempted simply to nullify those parts of the Act in order to maintain its climate policy.

As Kavanaugh explained in a dissenting opinion, the EPA was putting the regulatory cart before the legislative horse. If the EPA’s climate policy didn’t fit the Clean Air Act, then the EPA needed to change its policy, not the Act. Once again, Kavanaugh’s colleagues disagreed — and once again, the Supreme Court reversed the D.C. Circuit, largely adopting his approach in a 2014 case.

The third case involves judicial deference to an agency’s implausible and self-serving statutory interpretation. The Clean Air Act allows the EPA to impose certain air quality regulations when the agency concludes that such regulations are “appropriate.” When the EPA created new mercury restrictions for utilities, it refused to consider the enormous cost of those rules, claiming that such costs have no bearing on whether the rules are “appropriate.” Citing many scholars and judges, Kavanaugh concluded that it “is entirely unreasonable for EPA to exclude consideration of costs in determining whether” the regulation is “appropriate.” His colleagues rejected his approach and deferred instead to the agency. But in 2015 the Supreme Court reversed the D.C. Circuit and followed Kavanaugh.

In each of these cases, Kavanaugh sensed that the administrative state was pushing matters to a breaking point. Each time, his circuit colleagues rejected his approach, but the Supreme Court embraced it.

If Kavanaugh’s nomination succeeds and he winds up joining the Court, where his ideas already have had such influence, there are at least three places where he will likely have significant impact in reforming and modernizing the judicial doctrines surrounding the administrative state.

First, Kavanaugh has expressed reservations about the degree of “deference” that courts now give agencies’ legal interpretations. (The best example of this is his 2016 article in the Harvard Law Review.) This is an increasingly common theme among conservative judges — indeed, the justice whom Kavanaugh would replace (and for whom he once clerked), Justice Kennedy, raised the same concerns in one of his own last judicial opinions.

Second, and relatedly, Kavanaugh has been called on courts to be more skeptical of agencies’ assertions of power over the most significant economic and political issues of our times. In an opinion dissenting from the D.C. Circuit’s deference to the Obama FCC’s “net neutrality” rules, Kavanaugh argued that courts should presume that Congress did not commit such vast regulatory powers to bureaucratic agencies, absent a clear statement to the contrary. In this respect, Kavanaugh echoes Chief Justice Roberts’s own un-deferential opinion in one of the Affordable Care Act cases, where Roberts — joined by the Court’s four liberal justices — agreed with the Obama administration but expressly refused to approach the case with any interpretive “deference” to the agencies’ claims of authority.

Finally, Kavanaugh raises serious questions about novel forms of agency “independence.” In a case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Kavanaugh wrote a majority opinion holding the CFPB’s structure unconstitutional. The reason? The Dodd-Frank Act gave the CFPB an unprecedented measure of independence without the usual multimember agency structure that disperses in independent agency’s power among more deliberative body (as in the Federal Trade Commission). Kavanaugh’s majority opinion — which echoed themes raised by Chief Justice Roberts in an earlier Supreme Court cases — was eventually vacated by the full D.C. Circuit, where Democratic appointees enjoy a strong majority. But even then, Kavanaugh’s intellectual influence among other judges was made evident when his approach to the CFPB case was adopted by the federal district court in Manhattan in a different challenge to the CFPB. Even more recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit applied a similar analysis to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, holding the FHFA’s structure unconstitutional with a judicial opinion replete with citations to Kavanaugh.

At the Scalia Law School, I direct the Center for the Study of the Administrative State. It is no exaggeration to say that for the past decade, to study the administrative state has been, in no small part, to study Judge Kavanaugh’s D.C. Circuit opinions. With an appointment to the Supreme Court, his official title will finally match his real-world influence.

Adam J. White is research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and director of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. Previously, as a lawyer, he participated in some of the mentioned cases.

Postscript: A Majority Kavanaugh EPA Opinion

Last year DC Court of Appeals struck down EPA rules regarding HFCs and Judge Kavanaught wrote the majority opinion:

“EPA’s novel reading of Section 612 is inconsistent with the statute as written. Section 612 does not require (or give EPA authority to require) manufacturers to replace non ozone-depleting substances such as HFCs,” said the opinion, written by Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

“In any event, the legislative history strongly supports our conclusion that Section 612(c) does not grant EPA continuing authority to require replacement of non-ozone-depleting substitutes.. . In short, although Congress contemplated giving EPA broad authority under Title VI to regulate the replacement of substances that contribute to climate change, Congress ultimately declined.”

“However, EPA’s authority to regulate ozone-depleting substances under Section 612 and other statutes does not give EPA authority to order the replacement of substances that are not ozone depleting but that contribute to climate change. Congress has not yet enacted general climate change legislation. Although we understand and respect EPA’s overarching effort to fill that legislative void and regulate HFCs, EPA may act only as authorized by Congress. Here, EPA has tried to jam a square peg (regulating non-ozone depleting substances that may contribute to climate change) into a round hole (the existing statutory landscape).”

More at Gamechanger: DC Appeals Court Denies EPA Climate Rules

Footnote:

More and more likely we are witnessing a return to Constitutional separation of powers.