EPA rules to kill Texas seniors?

Texas seniors could literally be sweating EPA’s new air quality rules.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) warned in a new report that the EPA’s recently finalized Cross State Air Pollution (CSAPR) will reduce peak generating capacity, possibly causing rolling summer power outages.

ERCOT stated in the report,

Even in the best‐case scenario, ERCOT is expected to experience a reduction in available operating capacity of 1,200 – 1,400 MW during the peak season of 2012 due to implementation of the CSAPR. Had this incremental reduction been in place in 2011, ERCOT would have experienced rotating outages during days in August.

As pointed out in the JunkScience.com report “EPA’s Clean Air Act: Pretending air pollution is worse than it is” (March 2011), air quality in eastern states is clean and safe, and the CSAPR (also called the Clean Air Transport Rule) will bring no public health or environmental benefits.

Though U.S. air is safe, seniors won’t be if the EPA rules reduce the availability of air conditioning during heat waves.

As the EPA itself points out in “Planning for Excessive Heat Events: Information for Older Adults and Family Caregivers,

During an average summer, there are more than 1,700 heat- related deaths in the United States. In 1995, a heat wave in Chicago killed more than 700 people. The summer of 2003 in Europe, a record heat wave killed about 35,000 people. In both cases, most of the victims were older adults… People who do not have air conditioning are also likely to experience problems during heat events… Air conditioning is the best defense [against heat-related events].

Ironically, as air pollution in America has become history, the new reality is that the EPA is the real threat to public health.

Click for Houston Chronicle coverage of the ERCOT report.

9 thoughts on “EPA rules to kill Texas seniors?”

  1. James – I wish I could give you some hope about the left but I can’t. I thought I was a Democrat but some of the stuff coming down the pipeline lately is not what I signed up for. So, here I am…reading this and many other blogs and articles that seem to have some grain of common sense.

  2. This is just one more of a long list of intellectually deficient left wing liberal proposals which cause far more harm than it ever cures.

    Judging by Albert Einsteins oft-quoted comment that the definition of insanity is repeating a set of actions in the expectation of a differing outcome, the left are truly insane.

    They rely on the government to correct some deficiency, the issue becomes measurably worse, and they turn right around and ask them to correct some other issue.

    One would think that even as slow as they are, they would figure out that being zero for about a gazillion isn’t a ‘winning streak’.

  3. Texas is in trouble because they have signed in on wind power being a savior from global warming. One of the problems with wind power is the wind stops blowing in extremely cold or hot weather. Texas had rolling brownouts last February when a cold spell hit and its 10 gigawatts wind turbines stopped and natural gas for backup gas turbines was directed to home heating. Their wind turbines stopped this past August and apparantly they were able to provide enough electricity to prevent brownouts. If old coal plants are shut down, trouble will arise.

    James H. Rust

  4. EPA rules and regulations have been destroying our nation since it was came into being at an ever increasing pace. There is no semblance of science there, only madness.

Comments are closed.