On Aug. 7, Charlotte Lane, chairwoman of the West Virginia Public Service Commission, issued a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency supporting the proposed repeal of the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding and the many federal climate rules that rely on it.
In her letter, Lane repeats the typical coal industry fear-mongering that the existing climate rules "will result in rolling blackouts, ... caused by the lack of dispatchable power plants ... ."Â
With no evidence cited, Lane’s comments rely mostly on name-calling and incorrect assertions that control technologies are not commercially available. Worse, the comments focus only on the alleged cost of controlling greenhouse gas emissions and completely ignore the public health costs that would be prevented.
Lane is not alone, many of West Virginia's political leaders, including the governor, our congressional delegation and many in the state Legislature parrot similar talking points in a doomed effort to rescue an ever-declining coal industry.
Climate change is real, period. The impacts are serious, and since humans cause it, humans can fix it.
The EPA first adopted the Endangerment Finding in 2009, concluding that greenhouse gases endanger human health and the environment, and, therefore, should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. In the most blatant example of climate denial yet from the Trump administration, the EPA now proposes to repeal that finding. But ignoring the facts will not change them.
Unfortunately for the EPA, the scientific basis underlying that finding has only strengthened since 2009. Here in the real world, floods, fires, droughts and storms keep increasing. The number of climate-related catastrophes causing more than $1 billion in damages has increased many-fold in recent decades.
An important development is that new research is also improving the science of “climate attribution,†that is, assigning the cost and legal liability for damage from climate change to the largest sources of greenhouse gases. Many local governments and nonprofit organizations have already launched lawsuits seeking to recover damages, and while few have succeeded in the U.S., the trend is clear. The corporations emitting greenhouse gases will eventually be liable for the harm they cause. Climate denial risks increasing the costs to utilities, and to we, the ratepayers.
Worst of all for the PSC, coal simply is not economically competitive as a source of electricity. While the PSC continues to bend over backward to force ratepayers to bail out our coal-based utilities, ratepayers are saying “No†to never-ending rate increases. We are tired of footing the bill as polluters get richer.
No one in West Virginia’s political leadership wants to talk about climate change, or admit that it is real, as the PSC’s letter to the EPA makes clear. But the impacts to our health, the environment and our pocketbooks are very real. They do not go away simply because we refuse to talk about them.
Jim Kotcon is chairman of the West Virginia Chapter of the Sierra Club.Â
