Tuesday, March 27, 2012

EPA to impose first greenhouse gas limits on power plants

Looking forward to those rolling blackouts and increasing electric bills??  Here they come!!

EPA to impose first greenhouse gas limits on power plants

Daniel Acker/BLOOMBERG - The proposed EPA rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced.

By Juliet Eilperin, Published: March 26The Washington Post

The Environmental Protection Agency will issue the first limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants as early as Tuesday, according to several people briefed on the proposal. The move could end the construction of conventional coal-fired facilities in the United States.

The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.

And, just in case you forgot Obama’s thoughts on coal fired electrical generation – a little reminder in his own words:

Latest Global Average Tropospheric Temperatures

This is a pretty good example of solid science regarding current global temperature warming – or cooling – trends.  Bottom line?  For the past 30+ years – NO SIGNIFICANT CHANGE!!!
Latest Global Average Tropospheric Temperatures

Since 1979, NOAA satellites have been carrying instruments which measure the natural microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere. The signals that these microwave radiometers measure at different microwave frequencies are directly proportional to the temperature of different, deep layers of the atmosphere. Every month, John Christy and I update global temperature datasets (see here and here)that represent the piecing together of the temperature data from a total of eleven instruments flying on eleven different satellites over the years. As of early 2011, our most stable instrument for this monitoring is the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-A) flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite and providing data since late 2002.