Note: Energy is not the enemy
It was predictable, yet disappointing, to see that the first concerted effort to develop a coal-to-liquids project is running into roadblocks, and there are likely many more to come.
Gov. Brian Schweitzer has been a big booster of the Bull Mountain coal-to-liquids plant near Roundup. Yet a state hearings officer has decided that project backers need to start from scratch in getting an air quality permit, instead of proceeding with a modified permit that was first issued for a conventional coal power plant on the same site in 2003.
Oh well, that's not such a big deal compared to the likely hurdles ahead.
The Associated Press reports that Anne Hedges, a program director for Montana Environmental Information Center, said her group's successful challenge of the DEQ permit should be taken as a warning to the coal and utility industries.
"Every plant that wants to use coal and wants to increase global warming pollutants in Montana and across the nation is going to face the same obstacles," she said. "They are going to have a really long road ahead of them."
The MEIC, and other groups like it, are effectively taking it upon themselves to set energy policies for the state and the rest of the country. We don't recall the Montana Legislature or Congress passing a ban on coal production, or coal-to-gas development.
Even worse, there has been no debate about the costs and benefits of allowing or prohibiting coal development. What are the expected benefits for the climate and pollution reduction in stopping the Bull Mountain project? How much will it affect climate change, and what economic benefits will be lost if the project is stopped?
These questions never seem to be answered. Instead, we are told that all energy development is bad, as long as it's in the United States.
According to a report in the New York Times, "China already uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. And it has increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years in the broadest industrialization ever. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego."
But a single coal plant in Montana, using far more advanced technology, is bound to face relentless legal harassment from quasi-environmental regulators.
The point here is that the United States needs to pursue energy development somewhere, somehow. The country can't forever bow to the whims of environmental groups that have so far held huge sway in stopping everything from nuclear power to wind power.
Congress and state legislatures should be deciding what energy development is appropriate and do all that is possible to make it happen. We don't need to hear endless bleating about the need for "energy independence" with nothing to show for it.