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Danimal28's avatar

I can't even fathom having arguments about miniscule; this is all political shyte and money laundering.

In 1975 I sat in St. Paul traffic in the winter asphyxiating myself on exhaust emissions as a kid and ten years later car(and mfg plant) emissions were down with cat convertors, etc. In 1996 I took an IC engines course in college and CO and NOx emissions from a car were barely 1%.

The point? Continuous improvement that we do - not completely insane unreality.

Great piece, team.

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Lee's avatar

Nice article. In the 80’s I worked on installing a 50 Mw gate turbine at a sugar refinery in the north San Francisco Bay Area. It was the perfect co-generation application. The project was required to use best available control technology at the time. Most days the turbine exhaust was cleaner on the emissions we measured than the intake air, The state wasn’t impressed and gave the company a really tough time.

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Isaac Orr's avatar

Classic California

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Douglass Matthews's avatar

Failing to give “the company a really tough time” would have reduced the potential to extract rents.

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Ben Powers's avatar

Note to Americans who refuse to pay $10 per month on their electric bill for cleaner emissions heck even $1 … read below 👇 and understand how the so called progressives aka socialists manipulate them into spending $$$$ in their utilities bills, grocery bills, livelihood bills and with their votes for them again & again, saying THANK YOU may I have more … thank you President Trump 🙏🗽🇺🇸🗽

👇from the article 👇

This means that even when accounting for the cost of increased emissions in the Trump Proposal, repealing the Obama and Biden greenhouse gas regulations on coal and natural gas plants will yield over $314.6 billion in net benefits in the MISO region through 2055, and the benefits we discovered in this one region of the country were nearly 16 times larger than the benefits the agency expected for the entire country.

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Charles Wemyss, Jr.'s avatar

Once facts matter. The EBB’s present a compelling fact filled case for rules repeal. We have so little coal/oil generation left in NEISO, that NoX and So2 emissions etc are relatively meaningless. Yet five of the governors of the six New England states are convinced we are choking to death on green house gases, ergo more solar and wind. It is interesting to watch the greenest green fairy governor of them all Governor Healy get grilled on the beautiful people’s island of Nantucket about her continued support of large scale wind. It’s fun when politicans don’t have answers! Imagine the horror she feels when the big money on the island turns on her. We need gas fired generation, and SMR technology hopefully fulfills the potential and the promise.

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Roger Caiazza's avatar

Very good analysis. I apprecitate the references.

I have long held the same belief that the value of emission reductins when the air quality meets NAAQS is very low. The values that activists claim is amazing. For example the New York draft energy plan states "Through 2040, improvements in air quality are projected to result in public health benefits, including thousands of avoided cases of premature mortality, thousands of avoided heart attacks, thousands of avoided hospitalizations, and thousands of avoided emergency room visits for asthma, as well as many other benefits related to respiratory conditions, avoided work loss days, and more."

Here is the thing. The improvements in air quality since 2000 to today are at least an order of magnitude greater than the incremental air quality improvements they cite. Until such time that massive improvements are reported, then color me a denier.

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Nigel Southway's avatar

Common sense has prevailed. let’s keep it that way..... And forget CO2 its not in any shape should be controlled as a pollutant and the DoE report is the best thing to happen to climate science to get back to reality.... Lets focus on other things hurting and killing people such as ingrediants in food.

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Ted Kurtz's avatar

Nice piece, I appreciate the detailed description of the economic methodology.

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Al Christie's avatar

It might be interesting to do a study on the pollution effects of the worst polluters in the world, like

Russia and China. I'm not sure what we would find, but if their population is in pretty good health compared to ours, or about the same, then that would be evidence that toxic pollutants in the atmosphere are dilute enough that we shouldn't worry about it.

In any case, trying to put a dollar figure on pollution's 'cost to society' is a fools' errand - it's too nebulous.

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dave walker's avatar

Nicely done.

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Michael Smith's avatar

Well done and thank you! We are in your debt . . .

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Graeme Jorgensen's avatar

Thank you, Isaac and Mitch, this is another of your sensible and well considered pieces of analysis. I was always frustrated and angry that the HELE squad never stood up for themselves but, having worked actively in modern power plants over recent decades, I do understand that the sheer blindness of government and bureaucratic legislation was simply too hard to fight.

I sincerely hope that times have finally changed, in the USA at least, and that this refreshingly realistic view of fossil-fuelled electricity generation will become commonplace.

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