Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
8/1/2014
Businesses are feeling the effects of climate change and will be helped, not hurt, by proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulations on carbon emissions EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said last week during a call hosted by Business Forward. “It’s important for us to remember that businesses are being hurt today, the challenges are being felt and we really need a much more resilient, reliable, new, invested in, energy system and this can be a part of the impetus for that. It can make a little bit of a shift from the technologies of the past to open up doors for the technologies for the future and that’s going to help every business because it’s going help us prevent more disasters in the future,” McCarthy said.
The proposed regulations, dubbed the Clean Power Plan, set carbon emission reduction targets for each state and mandate that the states develop plans to meet those targets. How states go about reaching their targets up to them, McCarthy said, further stating that this design will spur investment. “The center piece of our proposal in the Clean Power Plan is really flexibility. That’s how it’s ambitious and achievable. That’s how we keep from prescribing solutions,” she said. “Instead we push forward to achieve some real measureable progress. Flexibility is sending a signal of certainty that directs investors towards more energy efficient and low carbon technologies.”
Since the announcement of the proposed regulations in June they have been widely controversial, drawing criticism from proponents of the coal industry who say the regulations will negatively impact the economy and result in lost jobs. These claims have been made before about earlier regulations, McCarthy said, and have not proven true. “We can take comfort in the fact that history has proven that EPA has found ways to reduce pollution while the economy has continued to grow,” she said. “Ever since EPA has existed, we have cut air pollution by more than 70 percent while at the same time GDP has tripled. We expect that this proposal will continue to do what we have traditionally done which is to get really good environmental improvements while we continue to be sensitive to the needs of the economies to grow and the opportunities to grow new technologies and make new investments moving forward.”
EPA Has Been in Contact With Industry
EPA has received feedback from “large multi-national companies whose names everyone would know,” and these companies “really recognize that the time for climate action is now,” McCarthy said. The feedback EPA has received from such companies suggests that the regulations will help businesses McCarthy said. “There’s many small businesses, entrepreneurs, new technologies that will tremendously benefit if there are investments in new types of technologies because this rule will really promote low carbon strategies, it will promote renewables moving forward, it will open up opportunities there. It’s going to promote opportunities to get more efficient existing fossil fuel facilities and technologies available there. There’s going to be a lot of job opportunities in energy efficiency technologies, demand side opportunities, everything from more efficient buildings to more efficient houses to more energy efficient appliances, you name it. This is going to provide opportunities for more investment, more technologies, more job growth and jobs of the future and our challenge is to get the business voice to the table.”
