Fossil fuel power plant owners are facing increased accountability for their air and water pollution, including from a new round of environmental and public health protections that are being rolled out by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). These new protections will include updates to power plant standards on carbon emissions, mercury pollution, and toxic coal ash pollution, just to name a few.
While these new rules will benefit the climate, the environment, and communities all around the country—particularly those near the power plants—fossil fuel companies, and intransigent power and utility companies, stand to lose by being less able to evade accountability for all of the damages caused by their operations. Their disinformation apparatus is therefore starting to spin up in response, pushing out false and misleading narratives that aim to water down the pollution measures as much as possible.
We’ve heard these lazily disingenuous narratives before. After the EPA proposed the Clean Power Plan in 2014, for example, fossil fuel interests and their backers tried to argue that the proposal’s 2030 emission-reduction targets were completely unrealistic, and that the country would see astronomically high costs and blackouts due to the rule. But in reality the proposed emission targets were achieved 11 years early in 2019—without the plan ever even taking effect.
With all that set as the backdrop, there are three basic facts about fossil fuel power plants that...
Washington, April 27 Prominent television hosts and journalists have pushed back against online claims that the White House ... Washington, April 27 Prominent television hosts and journalists have ...