New clean-energy regulations will bring new federal loans for technology development

A passage in President Obama’s second inaugural address last January began, “We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.” Now, in a pair of 20 September articles, the New York Times reports that the Obama administration is circumventing Congress and requiring cleaner energy technology in US electricity production; the administration will also offer loans to promote that technology’s development.

The article “Administration presses ahead with limits on emissions from power plants ” opens by emphasizing conflict: “A year after a plan by President Obama to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants set off angry opposition,” the article begins. “The administration will announce on Friday that it is not backing down from a confrontation with the coal industry.” Proposed regulations imposing “the first federal carbon limits on the nation’s power companies” are “an aggressive move” and “certain to be denounced by House Republicans and the industry as part of what they call the president’s ‘war on coal.’”

That article also addresses the topic that the second article engages: technology to enable power plants to comply. “Opponents of the new rules,” it reports, “argue that the technology to affordably reduce carbon emissions at power plants is not yet available.” It adds that industry representatives “argue that such technology has not been proven on a large scale and would be extraordinarily expensive—and therefore in violation of provisions in the Clean Air Act that require the regulations to be adequately demonstrated and not exorbitant in cost.” The article also notes that EPA officials counter that “the carbon capture technology has been used in several locations and that a review of the industry over the past year proves that owners of new coal-fired power plants can meet the new standards as required by the act.”

The second article, “US revives aid program for clean energy ,” reports that to help industries, including coal-fired power plants, to make cleaner energy, the Obama administration will “revive a controversial loan guarantee program at the Energy Department . . . even as the program remains under congressional scrutiny after losing hundreds of millions in taxpayer money on investments in failed green energy startups like the solar module maker Solyndra.” As much as $8 billion could be involved.

The Times reports crticism: “Officials say the federal subsidies are necessary to support the development of technologies that are too complex, unproven and expensive for investors and private companies to pursue on their own, assertions that have already stirred criticism from opponents who see the program as too risky and a misuse of taxpayer money.”

The Times also reports skepticism:

---

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.