Investor Presentaiton
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Section 111(d) into a tool to do unilaterally what Congress
purportedly "wouldn't”—“lead[] global efforts to address
climate change." JA.222. EPA took a new approach to
curbing emissions designed to alter the makeup of the
nation's energy grids-changing which plants generate
electricity and where they generate it.
The CPP required States to achieve reductions that
EPA admitted individual sources could not meet using
current or even near-future technologies and process
improvements. JA.853-54. To address this otherwise fatal
flaw, EPA asserted new authority to regulate source
owners and operators, as opposed to the sources
themselves. JA.543, 737, 761-62.
EPA then crafted a figure it termed the "adjusted CO2
emission rate." This accounting trick nominally counted
the emission reductions individual plants could achieve,
but it relied mainly on how much EPA believed source
owners could invest in different generators more
acceptable to the agency. Specifically, EPA divided the
amount of emissions from a given source by the amount of
that source's generation and the amount of generation
from EPA-preferred, zero-emitting sources. JA.1604-06.
The more generation from agency-approved sources
regulated source owners helped fund, the bigger the
denominator and the lower the "adjusted" rate. In this
way, EPA baked into its metric the idea that owners and
operators would subsidize renewable-energy sources like
windmills and solar panels.
EPA used this approach to impose an impossible-to-
achieve standard on coal-fired plants-limiting them to
two-thirds of the emissions the agency calculated they
could achieve using then-current technology. See JA.300;
EPA, DKT. No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2013-0602-36850, CO₂
EMISSION PERFORMANCE RATE AND GOAL COMPUTATIONView entire presentation