Karen Frantz
GHG Monitor
2/14/2014
As the Obama Administration has been working to advance the President’s Climate Action Plan, including crafting regulations setting standards for greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy have placed a huge emphasis on conducting broad outreach to stakeholders, Administration officials said this week. In remarks at a meeting held by the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners in Washington, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said that since he started his tenure at DOE, the agency has strongly emphasized expressing its intent to work closely with states, cities, regions and tribes—work that it is engaging in as it is conducting an energy review as part of the climate plan. “And let me say states is a key focal point,” he said. “This is a very pragmatic choice that we made to increase our focus in working with the states because in the end we all know it’s something that I think, remarkably, has been understated for a long time, that the energy needs-opportunities really are so different in different regions of the country.” He added that the only way the Administration could move toward an integrated policy going forward is to work with states.
Acting Assistant Administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, Janet McCabe, also said on a panel at the NARUC meeting that during her four years at the EPA, she has seen “an incredible increase in the amount of interaction that’s happening between us and you, between the energy regulating side and the energy policy side, and the environmental regulating side and the states.” She also said that the EPA launched “a really unprecedented effort” to talk with people about its anticipated rule setting GHG standards for existing plants, which is expected to be unveiled by June of this year, “in a way that really … has not been done before.”
State Utility Commissioners Applaud Efforts
A number of state utility commissioners at the NARUC winter meeting said they were pleased with the Administration’s outreach on the rule for existing power plants in particular. “I don’t think you, EPA, could have earned the respect of the state agencies any better than the way you conducted these listening sessions,” said Chairman of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission Joshua Epel, referring to 11 listening sessions the EPA held last year to receive feedback as it crafts the rule, expected to be rolled out in June. “There’s a level of trust which I don’t think we can describe and it just helps so much because we’re about to undertake an incredibly challenging—probably the most difficult environmental issue I can imagine.” Commissioner of the West Virginia Public Service Commission Jon McKinney said that in his 37 years in the chemical industry and eight years in the Office of the Commissioner that working on the rules with the EPA has been the first time he has done so “in such close quarters” and that it has been “a remarkable change.”
The comments stand in stark contrast to complaints from many Republican legislators, who have argued that the EPA skipped states that are heavily reliant on coal when it held the 11 listening sessions on the rule. The 11 listening sessions were held at each of the EPA’s regional offices, located in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, San Francisco and Seattle, as well as at its Washington, D.C., headquarters. One of the most vocal of those critics is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) who sent a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy last year decrying the failure to hold a listening session in Kentucky. “Despite the coal industry being a major contributor to America’s power generation, the EPA officials planning these listening sessions apparently do not want to listen to those who work in the coal industry,” the letter said. “All of these listening sessions will be held in major metropolitan areas—locations far away from the rural surface lands and mountains that provide coal for U.S. power plants and employment for thousands of hardworking Americans. … My own state of Kentucky ranks second in coal-fired electricity where 92 percent of the Commonwealth’s electricity comes from coal; yet, the Commonwealth is completely omitted from the EPA’s list.”
