One of the first acts of Gov. Mark Parkinson’s brief administration was a May 2009 deal to allow an 895-megawatt coal-fired power plant to be built near Holcomb. The agreement, which ended a nasty political fight, also led to long-sought clean-energy initiatives in Kansas including a renewable portfolio standard. That RPS lives on, surviving an attempted legislative rollback just this year. But the power plant remains unbuilt and recently took another legal blow, when a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected Sunflower Electric Power Corp.’s request to overturn a lower court ruling that had stalled the plant’s construction. Now, Sunflower CEO Stuart Lowry told the Garden City Telegram, “the question will be whether or not additional approvals will be required and, if so, what the scope of the environmental impact study will be.” There are other legal hurdles. And after four years it’s fair to wonder whether the plant will ever be financed and built, or whether the market for the power still exists. But Lowry argued: “The cost to date and the foreseeable cost are clearly outweighed by the benefits, even today.”
The wet spring is helping alleviate the drought in parts of Kansas. But as a recent New York Times article noted, lack of water is still a major problem for western Kansas farmers who depend on irrigation. “In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry,” the Times reported. “In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers. And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.”
Kansas House Speaker Pro Tem Peggy Mast, R-Emporia, initially said she didn’t recall writing the letter on her office stationery that was sent along with an anti-climate-change book to the homes of Kansas House members. But she later confirmed that she wrote the letter endorsing the book, which she has not read. Parts of Mast’s endorsement were taken almost word for word from a Publishers Weekly review of the book, the Topeka Capital-Journal reported. The book, “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism,” was distributed by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank funded in part by Charles and David Koch.
One environmental concern about piping Canada’s oil sands to U.S. refineries is all the petroleum coke that will be left over from the refining process. The Environmental Protection Agency no longer allows new licensing permits for burning the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste product, the New York Times reported. As a result, most petroleum coke is sold to Mexico and China, which don’t have as many pollution rules. Companies associated with Koch Industries and Bill Koch are leading exporters of the product. Another concern is where to store the petroleum coke before it is exported. The Times reported on a three-story pile of petroleum coke that covers an entire city block in Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit.
Remember the 850 dead fish. If that falls short as a rallying cry for upgrading Wichita’s sewer and water infrastructure, though, city leaders need only recall the sting of the $243,195 state fine for the 2012 sewage release that killed those fish in the Arkansas River. And the city got off easy this time, because KDHE let what would have been another $455,000 fine be spent instead on a citywide study of deferred sewer maintenance. The $11 million the city has banked for sewer repairs this year and next is great as far as it goes. But as Mayor Carl Brewer warned in his State of the City address this year, the city will need $2.1 billion over the next 30 years to maintain or replace the majority of its water, sewer and storm-drainage systems. Brewer and the rest of the City Council need to find the money and political will soon to tackle this long-term challenge, so more fish kills and fines can be avoided.
Can increasing American energy exploration improve our economy? Yes, but more to the point, it’s already happening. Energy – and the jobs and growth it will drive – is the foundation for our economic recovery. Our nation is blessed with some of the most abundant energy resources on Earth. Thanks in large part to the technology-driven shale boom, we have enough natural gas to power America for 120 years. We also have at least 200 years of oil under our lands and off our shores and more than 250 years of coal. And that’s just what we can recover with today’s technology. With continued advancements, we will be able to access even greater domestic supplies in the future. Energy presents the biggest opportunity to build a stronger foundation and a brighter future for our country. The 21st century has brought America an era of energy abundance. Let’s make the most of it for the sake of our economy, competitiveness and national security. – Karen A. Harbert, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Abandoning fossil-fuel exploration altogether is not feasible for America. But significant further government support of oil and gas drilling in places like the Alaskan wilderness or the American heartland in the name of economic growth would be a huge mistake. Instead, for our national security, economic growth and a sound energy policy, what we need is to shift to promoting industries and technologies that focus on clean, renewable and alternative sources of energy. Clean-tech is a fast-growing global industry that holds the potential to fix our current climate and other environmental challenges and build the jobs of tomorrow. The 2010 BP oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and the serious concerns raised about hydraulic fracturing have not merely been the results of chance. Nor are the extreme storms, droughts and heat waves, which are expected to rise in frequency and severity with fossil fuel use-linked climate change. The U.S. cannot afford to invest and lock itself into many more decades of reliance on the dirty and unsustainable sources of energy of the past. – Tseming Yang, Santa Clara University
As bad as the current drought is, that may not be the biggest water challenge facing the state. “It’s going to get warmer, which leads to more evaporation and transpiration,” Johannes Feddema, a climatologist and chairman of the University of Kansas geography department, said at a recent symposium in Lawrence on the future of water in Kansas. The changing climate will require farmers and others to reduce their demand for water, symposium panelists said.
Despite attempts by some local officials to portray “sustainability planning” as a United Nations plot to make us all ride bicycles and live in high-rise apartments, Kansans aren’t scared of it. In fact, 75 percent of those surveyed in a new Kansas Policy Institute poll agreed that communities should work with the Environmental Protection Agency and local groups to plan a “sustainable community.” This includes 62 percent of conservatives. What’s more, 65 percent of Kansans surveyed said that they wanted their federal and local tax dollars used to develop such plans.
An area of Arctic sea ice bigger than the United States melted this year, and ice cover reached “a new record low” in the area around the North Pole, according to a report released this week by the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization. Droughts covered nearly two-thirds of the United States this year, as well as western Russia and southern Europe. The Arkansas River in Wichita (in photo) is at its second-lowest level in the 78 years the United States Geological Survey has been keeping records, and the Mississippi River is so low that it is halting some barge traffic. Climate scientists are predicting more devastating storms like Hurricane Sandy due to shifting weather and air patterns caused by global warming. Meanwhile, the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank funded heavily by oil companies, is working with the American Legislative Exchange Council to write model legislation for states such as Kansas to repeal renewable-energy mandates.
“We believe the White House will reverse course and approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would ship crude from Canada’s western oil sands to the Gulf Coast,” ratings agency Moody’s predicted Monday. Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, told the Financial Times that the pipeline “will be a threshold test as to how serious the president is about producing America’s oil and natural gas.” But environmentalists want President Obama to make permanent his delay of the permit for the northern section of the pipeline, as a way to show he intends to tackle climate change. Noting that Obama’s victory speech mentioned an “America not threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet,” Bill McKibben wrote in the Washington Post that “if he really gets that this is the legacy issue of all legacy issues, one that stretches out into geologic time, then he’ll listen to the scientists and not the lobbyists. Keystone is his first best chance to help keep serious quantities of carbon out of the atmosphere.” Moody’s report on Obama’s second term also cautioned that regulatory scrutiny may increase for hydraulic fracturing and remain strict over deepwater exploration.
Though fluoridated water would have benefited everyone, the focus of the pro-fluoride campaign in Wichita was primarily low-income children, who have the most dental problems. So a map in Thursday’s Eagle of voting results in Wichita was striking. Some of the areas of the city that have the highest percentage of low-income children had the least support for fluoridation.
Kansas faces long-term challenges relating to the supply and quality of water, especially in meeting the demands of the energy industry and agriculture. Good for Gov. Sam Brownback for hosting a Governor’s Conference on the Future of Water in Kansas on Tuesday and Wednesday in Manhattan, featuring speakers including Sen. Pat Roberts and Lt. Gen. Thomas Bostick, commanding general of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Among the key questions on the table – how to conserve and extend the Ogallala Aquifer. The governor has done good work on water policy so far in his term, this year repealing the 67-year-old “use-it-or-lose-it” policy. He and other state leaders will need to continue to be foresighted and collaborative to ensure Kansas has the water it needs far into the future.
State lawmakers and county officials voiced concern last week about Gov. Sam Brownback’s veto of $750,000 in state funding for a program that protects drinking water, the Lawrence Journal-World reported. State Sen. Carolyn McGinn, R-Sedgwick, chairwoman of the Legislative Budget Committee, described the elimination of the program that helps local health departments inspect and monitor wastewater and water systems as “short-term conservatism versus long-term conservatism.” Other lawmakers complained that the state was off-loading costs on local governments, which may either raise fees or cut corners. Reno County, for example, has raised the fee to install a wastewater system from $90 to $275.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s goal of reducing the pollution that blows from one state to another is good. But it overstepped its authority with its Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, a U.S. appeals court decided Tuesday. The timetable for implementing the rule also seemed too fast and could have forced some energy companies to shut down power plants or triggered rolling blackouts. There was also some confusion about how the mandate would work. Westar Energy officials told The Eagle editorial board last year that they were already reducing pollution but would have trouble meeting the EPA’s timeline. Kansas delegation members were adamantly opposed to the rule and to the EPA. “I am pleased the court identified the EPA as exactly what it is – an overreaching and out-of-control bureaucracy, intent on forcing President Obama’s green agenda upon Americans,” Rep. Mike Pompeo said in a statement.
The proposed expansion of the Holcomb coal-fired power plant still faces some high hurdles, the Garden City Telegram reported. In addition to a legal challenge to its air-quality permit (which the Kansas Supreme Court is scheduled to hear late next month), the plant also must meet a deadline and new regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency. “One of the specific challenges we have right now is that under the proposed greenhouse-gas rule, the Holcomb expansion project and 11 others in the country are given one year to begin substantial construction – they avoid the effect of the greenhouse-gas rule if they do that,” Stuart Lowry, CEO of Sunflower Electric Power Corp., told Garden City leaders. “But the other EPA regulation – the (Mercury and Air Toxics Standards) rule – is effective immediately. And we’re being told that’s not achievable. So we’re sort of being twisted into knots. We could build under the greenhouse-gas rule and not have any negative effect. But if we can’t meet the (MATS) standard, we can’t operate.”
During a House hearing last week, a sarcastic Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, focused his signature dislike of energy subsidies and incentives on the renewable fuel standard, which mandates that 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel be blended into transportation fuel by 2022. “Why do I not hear from my constituents screaming for E15 and E85 if it’s such a good thing to lower consumer prices?… I was in four parades this week, and not a soul asked me about, ‘Sir, please, bring me E85,’” Pompeo pressed Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association. Dinneen said many consumers around the country want the option to use E15 (gasoline blended with 15 percent ethanol) if it’s less affordable and appropriate for their vehicles, and that the RFS gives them that. Pompeo countered: “You’re looking for a government mandate for your product.”
The Washington Post recounted how a real news story quickly morphed into a fake one, and then took on a life of its own. Five members of Congress from Nebraska wrote a letter last month to the Environmental Protection Agency asking about its use of small planes to check for water pollution (a practice EPA has used for more than a decade). This quickly evolved online into claims that the EPA was using drones to spy on farmers. Within a few days, the false story made it on Fox News and back to Congress, where one of the Nebraska lawmakers who wrote the original letter complained about the use of drones. Last year, the U.S. House responded to other false claims by passing a bill blocking the EPA from regulating farm dust.
Ford is introducing an electric version of its Focus. Mitsubishi, BMW, Tesla and other carmakers are also introducing new electric vehicles. And after a slow start, GM is on track to sell between 15,000 and 20,000 of its award-winning Volts this year. But this technology, like any infant industry, needs our support. Given this, it would be folly for Congress to slash the existing tax credit. If we cast a cold eye on the economics of electric vehicles, the credit is a bargain. Research shows that air pollution causes asthma, heart attacks, strokes and lung cancer – and costs taxpayers billions. A 2009 study by the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at the University of California at Berkeley estimates that over 20 years, electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids could reduce health costs by $4.5 billion to $11.2 billion. On top of money and lives saved, we have another clear reason to support electric vehicles: energy security. Yes, gas prices have fallen a bit in the U.S., but many independent researchers believe this is just a temporary reprieve. Electric cars not only save consumers money at the pump, they make our economy more resilient to price shocks and reduce the money flowing to hostile nations. – Nicholas L. Cain, Claremont Graduate University
It’s obvious now that electric vehicles can’t compete with gasoline-powered cars, even with generous government subsidies. And for years automotive engineers have documented that the performance of electric vehicles falls short in virtually every aspect. What’s truly shameful is that such disparities have done nothing to change policy. Subsidizing electric vehicles has been a devil’s bargain, making the development of other alternative technologies like conventional hybrids and advanced gasoline engines more difficult. Since 2008, taxpayers have spent or provided loan guarantees of $6.5 billion for electric vehicles. That includes $2.4 billion for battery and electric drive component manufacturing, $3.1 billion in loan guarantees for electric vehicle projects, and $1 billion in tax credits for the vehicles. Using taxpayer dollars to favor one automotive technology over another is contrary to the free-market principles that undergird our economy. Simply put, subsidizing electric vehicles doesn’t make economic sense. – Mark J. Perry, American Enterprise Institute
Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, and Kansas’ three other representatives sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson requesting that Kansas be allowed additional time to comply with the Cross State Air Pollution Rule. The new rule is designed to reduce pollution that drifts across state borders. It requires Westar Energy to reduce emissions of smog- and soot-producing pollutants or face large fines. Westar doesn’t oppose the new rule but wants more time to implement pollution controls. “Because Kansas started behind the eight ball, it has been virtually impossible for the utilities in our state to comply in time,” said Pompeo, who also has introduced legislation on this issue. “Political parties can have legitimate policy disagreements on how to best protect the environment, but I cannot sit back and watch while Kansas is forced to play on an uneven playing field when complying with EPA regulations.”
Don’t state lawmakers have more than enough unfinished business on their plates? Yet the House Federal and State Affairs Committee is holding a hearing Monday on a resolution condemning the “destructive and insidious nature of United Nations Agenda 21.” Good grief. Agenda 21 is a 20-year-old plan encouraging sustainable development. But some have turned the obscure document into a plot by the Obama administration to destroy “the American way of life of private property ownership, single family homes, private car ownership, individual travel choices and privately owned farms,” as the resolution puts it. Two Sedgwick County commissioners also cited Agenda 21 in their opposition last month to a federal planning grant.
When Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson testified at a House hearing Tuesday, Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, took her to task for her agency’s use of the word “polluter” in describing companies that have been subject to EPA enforcement actions but, in some cases, haven’t acknowledged wrongdoing. He pointed to a 2010 press release in which the EPA touted $3 billion in “investments in pollution control and cleanup as a result of legal actions taken against polluters.” Pompeo asked Jackson: “Is that the kind of press release you think is appropriate, sort of bragging about how much money you have taken out of the United States economy?” In response, she said: “We think it is important that the American people know that there’s an environmental cop on the beat. It deters people from violating, and that is an important part of an enforcement program.”
The Obama administration has rejected the Keystone XL pipeline for tar-sands oil. This decision puts the health and safety of the American people above the interests of Big Oil. And it confirms President Obama’s commitment to combating the threats of climate change, air pollution and oil addiction. Obama’s decision represents a victory of truth over misinformation. Here in the United States, oil companies trumpet false job claims and promise a secure supply of oil. But in the Canadian press, oil companies talk freely about using the pipeline to export oil to Asian markets and charge more money for the oil they do sell in the U.S. The facts reveal this pipeline was never in America’s national interest. It would have endangered our people, our air, our water and our lands for the benefit of oil companies. The Obama administration rejected the Keystone XL pipeline for all the right reasons. – Natural Resources Defense Council
The central conflict of the Obama presidency has been between the jobs and growth crisis he inherited and the president’s hell-for-leather pursuit of his larger social-policy ambitions. The tragedy is that the economic recovery has been so lackluster because the second impulse keeps winning. Proof positive was the White House’s repudiation of the Keystone XL pipeline, TransCanada’s $7 billion shovel-ready project that would support tens of thousands of jobs if only it could get the requisite U.S. permits. Those jobs, apparently, can wait. The State Department claimed that the two-month congressional deadline was too tight “for the president to determine whether the Keystone XL pipeline is in the national interest.” The White House also issued a statement denouncing Congress’ “rushed and arbitrary deadline.” This is, to put it politely, a crock. Keystone XL has been planned for years and only became a political issue after the well-to-do environmental lobby decided to make it a station of the green cross. – Wall Street Journal
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published a long-awaited final rule strictly limiting how much mercury, arsenic, hydrochloric acid and other deadly toxins that coal-fired and oil-fired power plants can spew into the air. The rule will save America billions more dollars in health care costs than industry will pay to comply with it, to say nothing of the suffering it will spare children, adults and families by reducing the avoidable deaths, developmental disabilities and disease caused or worsened by exposure to the plants’ poisons. The utility, coal, oil and chemical industries waged a long and brutal fight against the anti-pollution rule, which took more than 20 years to enact. Their tactics included warnings of huge costs, skyrocketing electricity rates, massive job losses and even possible regional blackouts, none of which were justified by objective data analyses. Ordinary Americans, businesses that insured their workers and government programs bore the cost of the health damage caused by the toxic substances the plants pumped into the air. Finally, after more than two decades, the cost of controlling those pollutants is shifting, as it should, to the polluters. – St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The so-called utility rule requires power plants to install “maximum achievable control technology” to reduce mercury emissions and other trace gases. But the true goal of the rule’s 1,117 pages is to harm coal-fired power plants and force large parts of the fleet – the U.S. power system workhorse – to shut down in the name of climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency figures the rule will cost $9.6 billion, which is a gross, deliberate underestimate. In return EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson says the public will get billions of dollars of health benefits like less asthma, if not a cure for cancer. Those credulous enough to believe her should understand that the total benefits of mercury reduction amount to all of $6 million. That’s total present value, not benefits per year. The rest of the purported benefits – to be precise, 99.99 percent – come by double-counting pollution reductions like soot that the EPA regulates through separate programs. Therefore, most will happen anyway. As baseload coal power is retired or idled, the reliability of the electrical grid will be compromised, as every neutral analyst expects. The economic harm here is vast, and the utility rule saga has been a disgrace. – Wall Street Journal
All four of Kansas’ representatives in Congress voted last week for the Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act, which would require that Congress approve any federal regulation that will affect the economy by $100 million or more. Rep. Lynn Jenkins, R-Topeka, called the measure a “commonsense bill” and hoped it would “ provide some measure of regulatory relief for our job creators.” But others view the bill, which has no chance of clearing the Senate, as purely political. And some advocacy groups warned of its dangers if it were to become law. Public Citizen called the legislation “the greatest threat to public health and safety in a generation.” Charles D. Connor, president and CEO of the American Lung Association, said: “This latest legislative assault would undermine decades of hard work to ensure public health is protected over special interests.”
Not only has President Obama largely avoided the global-warming debate during his presidency, he blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from setting new rules to cut smog levels. Meanwhile, global emissions of carbon dioxide increased 5.9 percent last year, the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, the New York Times reported. Still, columnist Thomas Friedman praised Obama for a little-noticed deal that could have a huge impact. All the top U.S.-based automakers agreed to improve the fuel efficiency of their fleets each year from 2017 until 2025, when the fleets will average 54.5 miles per gallon (twice the current average). “The new vehicles sold over the life of the program — including its first phase between 2012 and 2016 — are expected to save a total of 4 billion barrels of oil and prevent 2 billion metric tons of greenhouse-gas pollution,” Friedman wrote. “This is a big deal — a legacy deal for Obama that will make a significant, long-term contribution to America’s energy, environmental, health and national security agendas.”
One of the first acts of Gov. Mark Parkinson’s brief administration was a May 2009 deal to allow an 895-megawatt coal-fired power plant to be built near Holcomb. The agreement, which ended a nasty political fight, also led to long-sought clean-energy initiatives in Kansas including a renewable portfolio standard. That RPS lives on, surviving an attempted legislative rollback just this year. But the power plant remains unbuilt and recently took another legal blow, when a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected Sunflower Electric Power Corp.’s request to overturn a lower court ruling that had stalled the plant’s construction. Now, Sunflower CEO Stuart Lowry told the Garden City Telegram, “the question will be whether or not additional approvals will be required and, if so, what the scope of the environmental impact study will be.” There are other legal hurdles. And after four years it’s fair to wonder whether the plant will ever be financed and built, or whether the market for the power still exists. But Lowry argued: “The cost to date and the foreseeable cost are clearly outweighed by the benefits, even today.”
