1 year ago
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Today, the Biden Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency released new carbon pollution standards for both new and existing fossil-fueled power plants. In response, Collin Rees, United States Program Manager at Oil Change International, released the following statement:
“Until Joe Biden reins in the fossil fuel industry’s deadly expansion locking in decades of global fossil fuel pollution, his legacy will remain one of failing to confront the most significant way the United States is driving the climate crisis — oil and gas production.
“The United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer and exporter, with the Biden Administration supporting new fossil fuel projects like the Willow oil project, Alaska LNG pipeline and export terminal, Gulf Coast oil and gas export terminals, and the Mountain Valley gas pipeline. Today’s power plant pollution regulations are an important step, but pale in comparison to the United States’ massive expansion of oil and gas production.
“Legitimizing the fossil fuel industry’s fantasies of ‘carbon capture’ and ‘clean hydrogen’ co-firing at scale is a harmful choice by the EPA. These dangerous distractions have made vanishingly little progress over the last decade despite billions in public subsidization, and EPA’s further endorsement risks bolstering Big Oil’s strategy of delay and obstruction while endorsing an approach which experts have found could be prohibitively expensive while failing to achieve pollution abatement.
“The EPA’s exclusion of ‘peaker plants’ — power plants which only operate in times of high demand — from meaningful regulation is a blow to communities already overburdened by pollution and makes a mockery of Biden’s stated commitment to environmental justice. This exclusion must be rectified in the final rules.”
