Boucher defends position on cap and trade

By JIM TALBERT\Staff
TAZEWELL – The lesser of two evils is how Congressman Rick Boucher described cap and trade legislation.
Boucher said the Supreme Court’s ruled in 2007 that green house gases were pollutants and had to be regulated. He said that meant the Environmental Protection Agency would regulate the gases or congress would have to write the regulations.
He said the regulations did not originate with the current president and denied that Obama hated coal or intended to regulate coal out of business. Boucher said the regulation drafted by Congress was not perfect but did protect the coal industry.
He said voting no, as West Virginia Congressman Nick Joe Rahall, did would not have been serving his district. “I could have voted no and that would have taken me out of the picture when it came to negotiating what was in the legislation.
By staying in the process I was able to get some changes to the bill that protected the coal industry,’ Boucher said. He said Rahall and other coal country representatives who voted against the bill were not on the Energy and Commerce Committee as he is and would not have had input on the bill anyway.
He cited three key changes to the bill that he said protected the coal industry and allowed electric companies to continue using coal. He said the first change made emission allowances free.
The original legislation would have allowed the EPA to sell the allowances at an auction. Boucher said having to purchase those allowances would have driven the cost of coal so high electric utilities would have stopped using it.
Bob Blue, Executive Vice President of Dominion Electric, the company building a $1.8 billion coal fired plant in Wise County defended Boucher’s action. He said the plant would use 2 million tons of coal per year and is one of the few being built since the cap and trade legislation was proposed.
Blue said his company needed to know what the rules would be before they could invest in a project of that magnitude. He said Boucher did everything he could to make that project become a reality.
Boucher said American Electric Power the biggest supplier of electricity in the country also endorsed the legislation after his amendments were successful. The second amendment Boucher introduced was 2 billion tons of offset credits for use by coal companies.
Boucher said that meant companies could claim credit for actions such as planting trees to offset the pollution they emit. The third change placed money in the federal budget to pay for research to develop a program to sequester carbon monoxide.
A Russell County mine site is currently being used in the first phase of that research. Boucher said he is working to get the second phase in southwest Virginia as well.
He denied any knowledge of an EPA effort to get around that change by using the possibility of groundwater pollution since the carbon is stored in abandoned underground mines.
Jim McGlothlin, founder of United Coal Company said if it were up to him he would do away with the EPA and 90 percent of the federal government. McGlothlin said that was not possible and Boucher’s effort was the best alternative for the coal business.
“We have to be able to sell the coal we mine and it gets more expensive every year to mine that coal,’ he said.
Many in the large crowd at the town meeting asked why Boucher did not attempt to curb the power of the EPA. He said the steel mills and electric utilities are the only markets for coal.
He said that action would take 60 votes in the senate and would not make it out of committee in the house. “Even if it made it out of committee and the full congress approved it President Obama would likely veto it,’ Boucher said.
Boucher also expressed his concern about new attempts to regulate strip mining. “An appropriate balance must be struck between protecting the environment and allowing essential coal mining activities that support economic growth in the Appalachian region,’ he said.
He said Nationwide Permit 21 allowed state agencies to review permit applications under the clean water act and streamlined the process for projects that had minimal impact on streams.
Boucher said another regulation would make fly ash a hazardous material. He said that would increase the cost of disposing of fly ash and also take away a market from coal operators.
Boucher said 40 percent of fly ash produced is currently used in making wall board, concrete and other materials. “If it is deemed hazardous it will no longer be usable for that purpose,’ Boucher said.
The veteran Congressman also drew fire from people who said competing countries such as Brazil, China, India and Japan did not have such regulations. Boucher said Japan was part of the Kyoto agreement negotiated in the 1990’s and the other three were at this year’s meeting in Copenhagen though no agreement was reached.
The cap and trade agreement is currently in the senate and Boucher said he is working to get that body to make even more changes to it. He said regulation is inevitable and the bill passed by Congress was the best for the coal industry.