The ACA case in the Supreme Court is rightfully taking up most of the media oxygen at the moment.

But, via Romm, the EPA is also expected to issue its first limits on carbon pollution from power plants this week:

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.

Industry officials and environmentalists said in interviews that the rule, which comes on the heels of tough new requirements that the Obama administration imposed on mercury emissions and cross-state pollution from utilities within the past year, dooms any proposal to build a coal-fired plant that does not have costly carbon controls.

While these are ‘new source performance standards,’ they will also ensure that future electricity generation comes from renewable sources. Without the penalty incentive, the new technologies keep poking off down the road, never getting any closer. This is kind of a boring way to bring them into the near(er) future. Let the ennui ensue.

Not sure who reads unsigned editorials anymore, but there was a good one from the Times on Thursday touting a new EPA ruling on expansions of the Clean Air Act:

The rule, which takes effect in 2012, would cut emissions of sulfur dioxide, a component of acid rain, and nitrogen oxide, a component of smog, by more than half by 2014 compared with 2005 levels.

As is true of nearly every regulation spawned by the landmark 1970 Clean Air Act, the rule’s benefits will greatly outweigh its costs to industry — a truth routinely ignored by the act’s critics, most recently the Tea Party supporters in Congress. The E.P.A. estimates annual benefits at $120 billion to $240 billion, mostly from fewer premature deaths, hospital visits and lost work days associated with respiratory illnesses.

By contrast, the costs of new pollution controls and plant retirements are estimated at $800 million annually, on top of about $1.6 billion in capital improvements already under way in anticipation of the rule.

These new regulations are part of a package that includes new mileage standards for cars and reductions in other greenhouse gases – a way for WH to do the job of congress through the EPA.When cap and trade went from a foregone conclusion to a dead letter, there was really little other option for the Obama Administration to act on climate change, air and water pollution or any other snapshot of the future of the country than to issue new EPA guidelines. Again, howls of indignation from the Confederates, while the corporations on whose behalf they roam work feverishly to come up with new eco-themed advertising to disguise their craven end-times profiteering. For those who would like to see through the smoke, the crushing hand of government regulation momentarily stuns the intruder by being at home. Now where’s that bat?

It’s an interesting concept, especially as we’ve all but stopped letting the costs of war preclude us from war-making, but how much should protecting the environment cost us? In money and competitiveness, the issue is contentious, rife with conflicts, false promises and disinformation. But, let no one tell you that Republican officeholders at every level stand for anything but rolling back regulations and agencies charged with protecting the environment. While there was hardly ever any doubt about this, now there is not even a pose.

The budget approved by the legislature, led by Republicans for the first time in a century, eliminates the program as part of roughly $23 million in environmental program cuts that would chop more than 150 positions. All told, the department’s budget would be cut by 12 percent, more than double the cuts proposed by Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat.

The legislative budget also would shift some operations to the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which is led by a Republican commissioner, a move some fear would change the focus from environmental protection to business enhancement.

That’s in North Carolina, but it is everywhere the same. Democrats get elected promising to enact new regulations and fund alternatives; Republicans get elected promising to rein in regulations and lavish spending on boondoggles. Eye; beholder. I especially like this:

“I don’t want to destroy anything,” said state Sen. Don East, a Surry County Republican and an environmental budget writer. “I just don’t think these very stringent environmental rules that we are living under are going to do what the environmentalists say they do.”

How could they? I believe he doesn’t want to do any harm to anything, including taking any power away from anybody to release anything anywhere. You know, the little guy. Sorry, dude. That’s not a choice anymore. Now you have to actually make choices. Oh: you are.

The local environment, in China. You’ve heard about the smog, but just how bad is it?

• Surface water pollution is “relatively grave,” with 16.7% of rivers failing to meet any sort of grade standard–meaning the water is completely unfit for use (including in agricultural irrigation). And 42.3% of rivers are affected by eutrophication, a process where phytoplankton deplete oxygen from the water.
• Approximately one in five cities doesn’t meet China’s urban air quality standards, which are lower than those recommended by the World Health Organization. Acid rain was observed in over 50% of the country’s cities.
• 22% of the country’s 2,588 nature reserves are damaged in some way, mainly because as “economic development and industrialisation have gained momentum, unreasonable activities have weakened the function and value of those reserves.” In other words, the country is just too crowded.
• Heavy metal pollution is a growing (but still small) problem, with 14 reported cases last year and seven this year.

Something to remember in between all the talk about China being our biggest competitor. Point being: competitor for what?

Another thing, all this is from a report released by the Chinese government. It’s not like they’re being coy about it. Maybe we shouldn’t be, either.

Nice catch from Klein via Yglesias:

Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell University, is one of the more innovative tax thinkers I know. In particular, I’ve always been partial to his proposal for a progressive consumption tax (pdf). So I ran the plan by him, as well. “The progressive budget proposal is of course an enormous improvement over the bizarre Ryan budget,” he said, “which for all its chest thumping about facing up to the hard choices, does nothing — absolutely nothing — to reduce long-run deficits.” But like Gale and Burman, Frank wanted to see more simplification and reform. In particular, he wanted more attention given to what we tax with an eye toward two-fers: raising more money off of things we want less of. “When we enter congested roadways, or buy heavy vehicles, or drink to excess, or emit CO2 into the air, we impose costs on others,” he says. “Taxing such activities kills two birds with one stone: It generates much needed revenue, and it curtails activities that cause more harm than good. Because these taxes make the economic pie bigger, it makes no sense to object that we can’t afford them.” He recommended this piece (pdf) for more on those ideas.

Emphases from the link. But the key: raising more money off of things we want less of. The whole idea of a two-fer has only yet manifested itself in the heads and hearts of those who want to keep their tax money and penalize the poor, children and the elderly by teaching them some kind of lesson.

But Frank’s is the real way to get to the things that matter, one that also has many corollaries, among them: make sure more people finish school and can go to college, wherever they are from, so that they can get jobs and spend a long productive life of at least intermittent happiness paying taxes. Hello?

Banning certain kids from college is stupid. Not taxing the externalities of energy production, ditto.

Sure, Republican presidential contenders are going to roll out the DADT/Abortion carpet all over Iowa in their quest to be the Rightest of the Wrong. It’s what they do. It’s all they do. And Democrats might welcome their inclination to secure the 27-percenters.

But as this keeps happening over and over again, it might occur to us that the culture war idea is in need of expansion. After all, if the Kochs are going to fund movements and candidates to secure their right to pollute, they’re probably happy to keep people focused on these supposedly ‘values-oriented’ issues – that motivate the base of one side, and use up limited resources on the other – instead of fighting back in the green ground game.

Do you believe global warming is real? Do you support wind and solar energy projects? Should we incentive utilities and reward them for getting us to use less electricity? These are questions worth sparring over. And developing this ‘culture of life’ will probably be funner.

We’re playing catch- up on refocusing the big questions. Abortion? Or stabilizing atmospheric carbon levels? Culture of Life?

Just sayin’.

When you’ve got enough of it, green means being able to influence elections, muddy the water on issues of the day, even fund fake grassroots movements, aka Tea Parties (R.I.P), all to stoke your corporate agenda while you call it libertarianism. Huzzah! Jane Mayer has a well-written and well-reported piece in The New Yorker on the Brothers Koch and their exploits. You should read it all; it’s like contemporary American history in the making:

In a 2002 memo, the Republican political consultant Frank Luntz wrote that so long as “voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community” the status quo would prevail. The key for opponents of environmental reform, he said, was to question the science—a public-relations strategy that the tobacco industry used effectively for years to forestall regulation. The Kochs have funded many sources of environmental skepticism, such as the Heritage Foundation, which has argued that “scientific facts gathered in the past 10 years do not support the notion of catastrophic human-made warming.” The brothers have given money to more obscure groups, too, such as the Independent Women’s Forum, which opposes the presentation of global warming as a scientific fact in American public schools. Until 2008, the group was run by Nancy Pfotenhauer, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries. Mary Beth Jarvis, a vice-president of a Koch subsidiary, is on the group’s board.

Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, is the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a new book that chronicles various attempts by American industry to manipulate public opinion on science. She noted that the Kochs, as the heads of “a company with refineries and pipelines,” have “a lot at stake.” She added, “If the answer is to phase out fossil fuels, a different group of people are going to be making money, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re fighting tooth and nail.”

I’m as guilty as anyone of narrowing my focus at times and missing the big picture. But the big picture is huge and often difficult to grasp, and it’s good to be reminded that it’s not conspiratorial to think know that some people with means count on this, too, as just another tool in the pouch. Remind yourself that it takes some work to stay informed, that the 1st amendment is a kind of cautionary note, freedom in reverse – not to do nothing, but a responsibility to do more. Way more. Just to find out what you need to know. Especially when we’re as peopled with highly motivated oligarchs as we are. Besides the many other things they are, the Kochs’ activities equal exhibit A for the estate tax. 99.3% at least.

The late, great Vic Chesnutt once described during a show how [chairman of Eastern Airlines] Frank Lorenzo had destroyed Vic’s dad’s life. Combined with the little of Obama’s address I’ve heard, I was reminded of Vic’s dad and how our institutional failures get neatly organized into smaller issues for which singular persons are to blame – where we are left to ask ourselves how we can fix situation X, when it was caused by something altogether different.

No, the BP oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico is not your fault, despite what many pundits will tell you. Back in the 1960s when the environmental movement got going, major US corporations responsible for much of the nation’s pollution decided to fight it by paying for television advertising that urged individuals not to litter, thus implying that pollution is produced by anarchic individuals rather than by organized businesses. It was a crock then and it is a crock now.

You did not demand that BP consistently cut safety corners more than any other petroleum company, thus resulting in the Deepwater Horizon calamity, which could end up costing the economy of the Gulf of Mexico literally hundreds of billions of dollars this year.

How much the Gulf oil catastrophe is not your fault can more clearly be seen if we consider the ways in which a BP refinery in Indiana is threatening the Great Lakes with excess pollution.

The BP refinery received permission from the Indiana legislature to increase its ammonia and silt (infested with toxic heavy metals) output into the Lakes. The increased pollution was part of an expansion of the refinery to allow it to process Canadian tar sands. In addition, BP has illegally spewed extra benzene into the lakes (benzene is a known cause of leukemia) and has also repeatedly broken the law with regard to air pollution standards.

You did not ask BP to dump extra benzene illegally into Lake Michigan (the lakes are connected). You did not agitate in Indianapolis to permit the refinery to expand to handle tar sand, which is all by itself an ecological catastrophe. You did not demand that more ammonia and toxic metals be dumped into the lakes. None of these crimes against nature was your individual responsibility.

Rather, the Indiana legislature passed these laws because of ‘legislative capture.’ That phenomenon occurs when an industry that is supposed to be regulated by a legislature instead pays so much for political campaigns that it captures the members and proves able to write the legislation affecting its interests. Legislative capture explains almost everything that is wrong with America today, from the wars to the difficulty in expanding health care, and from inaction on climate change to the high price of prescription drugs.

Legislative capture is not your fault.

That’s the time to scratch it.

At killing people, that is.

Sticking with the X theme, and why not. Today’s Pigment of the Day: Madder lake.

So… positive words from Big Oil and their patsies political allies on the heels of efforts by Sens. Kerry, Graham and Lieberman to put together legislation capping global warming pollution. I guess ‘positive’ isn’t quite the right word – it’s kinda like the line in Raising Arizona:

Evelle: [about the balloons he just bought] These blow up into funny shapes and all?
Grocer: Well no… unless round is funny.

Ha. Ha.

Industry officials said they too welcome the discussions of a carbon fee as part of the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman effort.

“Clearly it softens the reaction and increases the likelihood that a number of people who’ve been forced to push back will be much more cooperative in the dialogue,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute.

Gerard said that the carbon fee approach would yield net environmental benefits, while giving consumers the most transparent signal they can get about what the costs are from the program. Unlike the House bill’s cap-and-trade system, oil companies would pass through the costs with signs at the gas pump letting people know they’re paying more because of U.S. efforts to deal with climate change.

As Grist reports, the energy companies like the fee because they’ll be able to complain about it as a tax ‘Americans cannot afford’. Actually, re-setting a highly mobile bar, they will be decrying the removal of $80 billion in loopholes and oil company subsidies as an “unprecedentled tax.” Dig it.

I mean, drill… or whatever. The oil companies see the handwriting on the wall. We can’t change underwear without taking off our pants – and they know what a zipper sounds like, as much as they will spend spin like crazy to try and tell you it’s bubbling brook.