Meet EPA, Project designer

Link to Inhofe EPW Press Blog "Ohio EPA has great concern that U.S. EPA front line staff will take this guidance as a 'green light' to be able to dictate every small aspect of a new facility, using GHGs BACT as the reason." Chris Korleski, Director, Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, December 1, 2010

How far will EPA go in regulating greenhouse gases? Bill Becker, Executive Director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies (NACAA), and a key EPA ally, knows: "For the first time in history, EPA will require that facilities go through a process of examining every piece of their operations and take actions to improve energy efficiency." [Emphasis added] This is a remarkable admission, amply confirming the suspicion that EPA's climate change rules are not about climate change but subjecting the intricacies of private economic decision-making to EPA diktat. This reality has alarmed Chris Korleski, Director of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. In his 6 - page opinion assaying EPA's draft guidance on what constitutes "best available control technology" (BACT) for greenhouse gas emissions, Korleski, appointed by Governor Ted Strickland (D), meticulously exposes EPA's unprecedented intrusion into private businesses. While this is only a policy guidance and not a final rule, Korleski correctly notes that under this guidance "U.S. EPA will not only have the authority, but as part of the permitting process, permitting authorities will have an obligation to examine every small detail of a source. This is hardly 'business as usual.'" EPA, Korleski points out, has effectively proposed that "the permitting authority essentially 'deconstruct' [a] facility to find major energy uses and then review the equipment to ensure the most efficient energy approaches are being used." What does that mean? In an attempt to reassure the regulated, EPA states that permitting authorities can avoid "an assessment of each and every conceivable improvement that could marginally improve the energy efficiency of the new facility as a whole (e.g., installing more efficient light bulbs in the facility's cafeteria)." But this merely states what a permitting authority should avoid-leaving open myriad possibilities for statist architecture. As Korleski notes:

[S]tating that permitting authorities do not have to go to the level of asking what type of lighting will be used in the facility's cafeteria is not helpful. Does this mean that everything that consumes more energy than the lighting in the cafeteria has to be evaluated?

Korleski continued: "For example, must permitting authorities evaluate the energy efficiency of induced draft fans and electric water pumps?" Good question. After reading EPA's vertiginous 97-page guidance document, the answer could be 'yes'. EPA, of course, may consider such analysis no big deal, but Korleski believes that "this type of analysis has not been required prior to the issuance of the guidance and puts the permitting authority in the position to 'redesign' the source." Permitting authorities could further be required to get into the unprecedented business of determining a project's indirect greenhouse gas emissions. As EPA would have it, permit writers considering, say, emissions from a new coal-fired power plant, could factor in "the fuel needed to mine, transport, and process the coal." That prospect has Korleski deeply concerned:

Ohio EPA does not have the technical expertise to attempt an analysis on everyindirect emission of GHGs associated with a source. Far from 'business as usual,' the guidance suggests a far more detailed analysis than has ever been done for a PSD application. With the coal arriving to a plant by rail, barge, or truck, or possibly conveyed from a mine nearby, there is no practical way to be assured of an exact method of coal shipments. Permitting authorities should not be getting into that level of analysis.

But if EPA's guidance stands, some will. Bill Becker with NACAA sees no problem. Indeed, as he, and EPA, sees it, businesses should welcome such intrusion, for when it comes to energy efficiency, "they should have been doing that anyway." Maybe so, but small businesses, and even some permit writers, are shuddering at EPA defining, and dictating, exactly what "that" means.

EPW Blog——Bio and Archives

Inhofe EPW Press Blog