I read several articles this past weekend to understand what is going on with FutureGen and CAMR. There is a great article on the Columbia Journalism Review (http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/is_sustainability_reporting_su.php), entitled "Is Sustainable Reporting Sustainable." The article points to a notable question of whether environmental news is just hot at the moment or whether it is a burgeoning topic grabbing further attention from journalists in the long-term. Is there enough environmental news to go around, and will the public stay interested years down the line? With so many new environmental regulations coming out, there is certainly a lot to report on but which audience will really stay interested? Power companies will certainly want to hear all the updates on the Lieberman-Warner Bill or the next update on EPA policies such as CAIR and CAMR, but the general public might cringe at the next mention of greenhouse gases or climate change. "I'm so sick of hearing about it," my mother says as she flips through the channels. The reason I point out this article from the CJR is that the author, Russ Juskalian, a masters of journalism student at Columbia, suggests that there are parts of environmental reporting that will need more reporting and will beg the attention of journalists: the paradox in environmental policy. He mentions how Bush, in the passing of his new budget plan, calls for greater funding for CCS (carbon capture and sequestration), but then the previous week, the government just removed its backing fo the FutureGen project. The FutureGen project was an investment by the government and a group of eletric companies including AEP (a large coal burning eletric utility) to build a relatively small eletric plant in Illinois that would be close to carbon neutral. Almost all the carbon in emitted would be been stored in underground storage areas near the plant, but the costs became too high. I think I read close to an estimated 1.8 billion; they originally thought it would stay below 1 billion. So now the project was cut, and what does that action say to the future of power generation and environmentalists? Environmentalists might be happy because they don't like coal anyway, but i have heard countless scientists say that coal is still a part of the future of power in the U.S. because it is so abundant and cheap. And until we find an alternative, we will still be using coal. The FutureGen project was a worthy investment. True, the costs were growing exorbitant, but then create more funds or financial plans to finance it. Don't just cancel the project after $50 million were already invested in it. Again, I don't know all the details, but I've been hearing this name, FutureGen, being talked about quite a bit as if it is a very positive project, a positive test and experiment to show how American can realistically burn coal, generate power, and decrease emissions. Canceling the project so abruptly seems like snubbing a very promising project.
CAMR was another big topic because on Friday, the program was just rejected. There were 2-3 big reasons involved. One, the EPA was trying to "delist" mercury as a hazardous pollutant which violated the 1990 Clean Air Act. Apparently the EPA thought that with the scrubbers and SCRs being installed, Hg would be indirectly captured and thus the emissions would be reduced indirectly. Because of the indirect reductions, the EPA thought the levels of Hg in the environment would no longer be considered hazardous so they were trying to delist it, but the D.C. courts shot the EPA down. Secondly, environmentalists thought the EPA was being too lax with polluting energy companies, and the mercury restrictions were not strict enough. States started drafting their own Hg emission standards that were stricter than the CAMR restrictions. All in all, CAMR was thrown out and now the EPA has 2 years to come up with a new program. The goal is decrease the 48-50 tons of hg emitted per year from teh energy industry down to 15 tons.
