Early reactions to the Obama administration’s final Clean Power Plan, announced Monday, run the gamut. The plan could either be A) painless to implement and a boon to public health and the climate or B) a costly millstone on the economy that will jeopardize the electricity grid.
Amazingly, most of those reaching one of these polar-opposite judgments did so long before the final announcement even took place. How could they be so sure?
They couldn’t be. The Clean Power Plan has become yet another important policy on which public discussion is degraded by an onslaught of political spin.
The truth is the Clean Power Plan, which mandates a 32 percent overall reduction in carbon emissions from power plants by 2030 — and somewhat more for Colorado — is not going to cripple the economy, although some states will have a harder time than others.
But the plan, which will require massive investment to retire many coal-fired plants nationally and build new infrastructure, will not be painless, either. The investment will be rolled into electricity rates. It’s hard to see how that can occur and the plan also reduce the average American’s monthly electricity bill by 7 percent in 2030, as the Obama administration projects.
Gov. John Hickenlooper termed the goals “ambitious” but promised the state would rise to the challenge.
The final plan is a clear improvement in one respect from last year’s draft. It extends by two years what was an overly ambitious deadline for states to meet their first targets to reduce carbon emissions.
On the downside, according to Larry Wolk, chief of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, “We didn’t get as much credit as we were hoping for” in terms of the clean-energy efforts this state made before 2012.
“It’s attainable,” he said of the final plan, “but it’s going to be challenging.”
Implementing the project is going to be an immensely complex undertaking without precedent in terms of resource planning on a statewide basis.
As the Hickenlooper administration moves forward, it is essential that it adopt a process that is as open and transparent as possible so ratepayers can be confident that deals won’t be struck behind closed doors.
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