Buy a link now!
When the Obama Administration announced tough new pollution regulations for power plants last year, the industry loudly protested. The rules, which among other things will require coal-fired plants to make deep reductions in mercury and sulphur dioxide emissions by 2015, will cost utilities at least $12 billion, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates. Coal producers put the price tag at $21 billion. They say electricity prices will spike 12 percent, dozens of plants will close, and thousands of workers will lose their jobs. “This rule is the most extensive intervention into the power market and job market that EPA has ever attempted to implement,” says Scott Segal, a lobbyist at Bracewell & Giuliani, which represents the utility Southern Co. He argues the regulation will “undermine job creation in the United States.”
Tell that to Cal Lockert, the vice-president of Breen Energy Solutions, a Pittsburgh manufacturer of equipment that absorbs acid gases to keep them from spilling out of smokestacks. Lockert spends his days persuading power companies that he can help them bring some of their oldest, dirtiest plants in line with the federal requirements. There’s been “a frenzy of engineering firms and utilities” calling him for demonstrations of his products, he says. He’s hired a dozen people in the past month and says he’s just getting started.
Nol-Tec Systems in Lino Lakes, Minn., also expects a boom in sales of its equipment, which uses baking soda to pull pollutants out of plant exhaust. Meanwhile, Thermo Fisher Scientific in Waltham, Mass., is building emission monitors that power plants will need to measure toxins under the new rules. The regulations “could easily add $50 million to $100 million dollars in revenue in a year or two years,” says Chief Executive Officer Marc Casper, “which is significant for a company like ours.” The Institute of Clean Air Companies, a trade association representing businesses that make products to reduce industrial emissions, forecasts the industry will add 300,000 jobs a year through 2017 as a result of the EPA rules.
This is the side of the story that rarely gets mentioned in Washington or on the campaign trail. In an election year that hinges on the economy, government rules have become politically toxic. President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, the massive Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and EPA clean air and water mandates come under frequent attack from Republicans who say burdensome regulations are stalling the nation’s recovery. In the GOP debates, the R-word is now habitually preceded by “job-killing,” as in Mitt Romney’s promise to put an end to “job-killing regulations.” Newt Gingrich refers to the EPA as a “job-killing regulatory engine.”
Romney and Gingrich aren’t wrong. Government regulations do kill jobs, often by the thousands. Although it’s too early to tell how many layoffs may result from health-care and Wall Street reforms, there is a body of research going back decades detailing what has happened time and time again when Washington handed down sweeping environmental regulations: Costs increased, prices went up, and workers were fired. Supporters and opponents of the EPA’s new power plant rules agree that they will almost certainly result in dozens of coal plants shutting down and hundreds of workers being laid off.
But that’s not the whole picture. Government employment figures also show that those same regulations usually wind up creating about as many jobs as they kill. “We find there is no net impact,” says Richard Morgenstern, the EPA’s director of policy analysis in the Reagan and Clinton Administrations and now a researcher with Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan energy think tank in Washington. “The job creation and the job destruction roughly cancel each other out.”
©2011 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.
Read Full Article »