Last week the Supreme Court ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed regulations on power plants. These regulations would have cost energy consumers and producers in the U.S. around an extra $10 billion annually for electricity.
In 2012, the EPA proposed these regulations would have limited hazardous air pollutants spewed by oil- and coal-powered power plants. A huge oversight of the EPA in this analysis was that the effects of this limitation would have resulted in only $4-6 million worth of health benefits by eliminating air pollutants, versus the $9.6 billion dollars in increased energy costs.
Additionally, the Mercatus Center’s Regulatory Report Card revealed that the EPA made no considerations for alternative regulatory measures in their research analyses.
The EPA’s lack of financial consideration in research is, sadly, just more ammunition for climate change doubters.
Last year, Wyoming became the first state to reject new academic science standards for K-12 students. This was mainly due to the inclusion of man-made global warming components.
This is not hard to understand as Wyoming is, by far, the largest coal producing state with 40 percent of the nation’s coal energy coming from Wyoming. Additionally, in 2012, the industry provided 6,900 jobs to citizens and $1 billion dollars to state and local governments in mineral taxes.
State Education Board Chairman Ron Micheli told the Casper Star-Tribune that he believed the Next Generation Science Standards were “very prejudiced in my opinion against fossil-fuel development,” and that they do not teach “the cost benefit analysis.”
If Micheli’s statement that the standards do a poor job of teaching the cost benefit analysis to students is true that is something that needs to be amended, not cause for the whole of the curriculum to be tossed out.
Even worse is the irony of poorly equipping the state’s youth in the knowledge of climate change while simultaneously contributing to the degradation of the state of the earth that coming generations will inherit.
Clearly, the coal industry provides many jobs and generates much revenue for the state. But it would be a tragic, myopic error to neglect the responsibility we have in mitigating the effects of global warming through reducing green house gas emissions in the largest coal producing state.
A balance between economic responsibility and environmental prudence must be found.
