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The Obama Administration’s Self-Sabotaging Coal Leases

The Powder River Basin, which stretches over twenty-six thousand square miles of southeastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming, is the largest coal-producing region in the world. Roughly forty per cent of the coal that’s burned in the United States is mined there; this comes to nearly four hundred million tons a year. And there’s plenty more still in the ground. A recent report by the U.S. Geological Survey estimated recoverable reserves in the region at more than a hundred and sixty billion tons.

The federal government owns most of the coal in the Powder River Basin, and leases the land to private companies that mine it for a profit. Last week, the Bureau of Land Management released a new plan for the region’s future, one that is very much in keeping with its old plan. The B.L.M. will offer more federal land for leasing in the hopes of keeping coal production up. At a time when the Obama Administration is trying to cut carbon emissions, many have questioned how new coal leases fit with this goal. The simple answer is that they don’t. This, of course, leads to another question: What’s going on here?

In March, the White House pledged that, by 2025, the United States would reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by at least twenty-six per cent. (This is against a baseline from 2005.) The pledge, which was made in preparation for international climate negotiations to be held in Paris this coming fall, reiterates a commitment the Administration made last November, when it announced a historic deal with China. (China, for its part, pledged its emissions would peak by 2030.) Coal-fired power plants are the largest single source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the U.S., and the centerpiece of the Administration’s plan is a set of new power-plant regulations that the Environmental Protections Agency released last year. These regulations are expected to reduce demand for coal by compelling utilities to shift toward less carbon-intensive fuels, mainly natural gas, and carbon-free energy sources like wind and solar. (Independent analysis suggests that the White House’s plan is insufficient to produce the cuts it has promised, but we’ll leave that issue aside for the moment.)

If the Administration is serious about cutting U.S. emissions, it certainly can’t expect domestic coal use to increase. (Coal production in the U.S. has, in fact, been dropping, owing to tighter domestic regulation and low global coal prices.) So where’s the coal from the new Powder River Basin leases supposed to go? If the industry has its way, it will go to other countries. Since 2011, six new terminals have been proposed for the Pacific Northwest, all aimed at boosting coal shipments from the Western U.S. to Asia. There’s been strong local opposition to all of these proposals and it’s unclear if any of the terminals will actually get built, but obviously cutting coal use in the U.S. only to ship more coal abroad is no way to save a climate. An analysis by Greenpeace suggests that if all the coal that could be mined from the proposed new Powder River Basin leases is burned, in the U.S. or overseas, the resulting carbon emissions will exceed the carbon cuts expected from the new power-plant rules by a factor of three.

So what does the Administration think it’s doing? Writing recently in the Times, Bill McKibben, the author and activist (and former staff writer for this magazine), excoriated the White House for talking the talk, but walking the other way. By McKibben’s account, the Obama Administration has been too timid to stand up to the fossil-fuel industry, and the result is a new variation on an old theme.

“This is not climate denial of the Republican sort, where people simply pretend the science isn’t real,” McKibben observed. “This is climate denial of the status quo sort, where people accept the science, and indeed make long speeches about the immorality of passing on a ruined world to our children. They just deny the meaning of the science, which is that we must keep carbon in the ground.”

Writing for Vox, David Roberts was somewhat more sympathetic to the Administration’s position. He noted that most policy analysts argue the only plausible way to reduce emissions is to focus on demand, as the supply of fossil fuels is, for all intents and purposes, endless.

“The amount of proven global fossil fuel reserves so wildly exceeds what would be necessary to fry the planet that there’s simply no prospect of restricting supply enough, in enough places, to make a difference to the climate,” is how Roberts summarized this position. “It will just be an endless game of whack-a-mole; for each supply project shut down, the value of the remaining deposits will rise and new supply projects will come online.”

The reason global coal prices are now low is that there’s a glut of coal on the market. The same goes for oil and natural gas. The lower fossil-fuel prices are, though, the more difficult it is for energy sources like wind and solar to compete economically. This is a reason most experts also agree that the only way we’re going to make a real dent in emissions is through some kind of carbon tax. The Obama Administration has never even proposed such a tax, which is understandable, since the odds of getting it through Congress are precisely zero. And so the White House’s energy policies remain a muddle. Trying to curb emissions while also trying to keep fossil-fuel production high is like starting a diet by going out and buying a couple of pints of Ben and Jerry’s: as McKibben points out, the Administration is undermining its own best efforts. But such a muddle is probably the best we can expect until and unless American voters demand something more coherent.

source: http://www.newyorker.com