Guest Post by David Middleton
The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is out with their latest “Toxic Twenty” list…
The NRDC’s report is standard green claptrap. Kentucky led the Toxic Twenty, “emitting nearly 40.6 million pounds of harmful chemicals” in 2010.
That’s like 20,000 tons in just one year! I guess we better shutter Kentucky’s 72 GWh of electricity generation.
The first thing that crossed my mind was the fact that the “Toxic Twenty” looked a lot like a list of the nation’s top electricity generating States…
In typical “green fashion” the NRDC casually dismisses this fact, noting that “in 2010, these same states accounted for just 62% of electricity generation.” It boggles the mind. 40% of the States generated more than 60% of the electricity.
Here’s a comparison of April 2010 electricity generation for the “Green Thirty” vs. the “Toxic Twenty”…
If you back out hydroelectric generation, the ratio grows to 68% to 32%. Since the NRDC are probably not fond of dams, I doubt they’d really count that as green electricity.
Here in Texas, we have a saying for groups like the NRDC: “Y’all can freeze in the dark for all we care.”
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Oops… an error in my previous statement. It should be two out of the eight and five out of the eleven. Regardless, less than half of the top eight/eleven polluting states are on the top eight/eleven electricity generating states.
Of course, the more states you look at the, the more that will appear on both lists (until you eventually get all states on both lists), but the top ten is 20% of the states, and the correlation in the top ten is not very high.
“Michael Kelley says:
August 13, 2012 at 10:59 am ”
The other secret is that the Clean Air Act was completely unncessary…because pollution levels were coming down on their own due to local ordinances and other forms of local regulation. There was never a reason to centralize the pollution controls because in the end people dis-like pollution and it effects locals more then anyone else.
But you are correct, pollution levels have been decreasing but they have been doing so for the last 100 years.
To all who are looking at the total numbers of production versus MW/hr produced (or similar metric) this gets you into trouble often times. The point made at the top of the article is that the “toxic 20” is rather abritrary and that its not really relevant. I think the point remains if you think about it. It all depends on how the “toxic 20” was exactly computed. Is nuclear power clean? (IE what are the emissions from this?) Is hydro-electric clean? Are transport costs included for fuel and for the maintanenace of “renewable resources?” Think fuel costs as well. How is this computed? I think the answer is that its not, and that they rather just grade based on what they think of as bad forms of power generation, mainly coal if I had to guess.
And so on. Look at Kentucky in detail in map form here: http://www.eia.gov/state/state-energy-profiles.cfm?sid=KY
•Ninety-three percent of Kentucky’s net electricity generation in 2011 was generated from coal.
That is directly from the link. Lets look at the other toxic 20 in more detail … http://www.eia.gov/state/seds/seds-states.cfm?q_state_a=TX&q_state=Texas
For instance Texas produces the most power of the states, but is only number 9 on the list of pollution. Why is this? If you look at Texas production of electricity by source:
Coal = 36.5%
NG = 45.4%
renewables = 6.7%
Nuclear = 10%
As a caveat, the way this is figured out might be what is consumed as well by a percentage, but it does give an idea (the source is the same website in this case) about how things are computed for the toxic 20. Coal is bad, and NG is lesser bad, but renewables are good. When you are looking at this in particular, this is what you will find.
Now that we know this, look at Ohio. •Coal fueled 78 percent of Ohio’s net electricity generation in 2011, nuclear energy contributed 11 percent, and natural gas added another 8.9 percent
Pennsylvania: 44% coal, nuclear 33%, but PN is also a big producer of electricity, so this makes sense.
Indiana: Coal 83 percent of Indiana’s net electricity generation in 2011.
West Virginia: 96% coal
Florida: 66% NG, 23% coal, but Florida also produces the second most power of any state. Texas is #1.
And you find more as you look at each Toxic 20 state. I would look for what makes states NOT TOXIC next, but heck that is for some other time by someone else. But a cursory look at California tells us that I was correct in my assumptions:
Over half of Cali’s power comes from NG. Almost no coal, and a high amount of nuke (17%) and other renewables. This is why the state is “green” so to speak. Probably also why electricity costs so much there, but that is neither here nor there.
benfrommo, that makes a lot of sense. The linked report in turn links to a NRDC report which claims to use the publicly available figures given to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory (TRI).
My next question was then what constituted a toxic chemical, because I wondered if they included CO2 in that list. However, while I’m not absolutely sure, I couldn’t find it when I did a search on the TRI so I presume not.
So all this report is doing is confirming that coal powered electric generation produces significantly more pollution than the alternatives such as natural gas or nuclear. I’m a little surprised at how much more, but then I’ve never looked into the details that closely, so I suspect it’s not a surprise for anyone working in the industry.
@benfrommo
Thanks, if you look at the top of the post I asked this question, but you are the only one to answer it.
NP on the reports, as for what I was really trying to show was how generalized and how third grade level this analysis was, and in turn I guess they based their findings on what the EPA does…which is the same level. Some have likened it to propaganda which I would tend to agree with.
Basically, all they do is say “pollution of this type is THIS bad” and then monkey with weights on different “exhaust” types to give the results they desire. You could create a chart of “20 worst states” based on any weight you wanted to, and they indeed do based on what I thought they would…..They hate coal most, and NG they dislike, but say its “tolerable” because of knee jerk reactions. No actual science used, so in effect yes the toxic 20 is just some “who’s who list of who produces the most coal fired electricity”. And the more you use nuke or hydro or renewables, the better, but the rest has to be NG because very few new nukes are going up and electricity usage will only increase unless our economy indeed goes down the toilet because in the end the two variables economic expansion and energy usage have always been directly related to one another.
Graeme, I think you may be reading something into my post that isn’t there. Or at least wasn’t intended to be there. Perhaps the problem is in the way I worded this…
Upon reading that list, the first thing that crossed my mind was that most of the “Toxic Twenty” States were also among the nation’s top electricity generating States. I was not literally correlating the State positions on the two lists.
I should have illustrated this relationship with a Venn diagram.
CO2 is not part of the TRI. Despite the endangerment finding, CO2 is still not listed as a pollutant on their Air Trends page.
@ur momisugly benfrommo,
Great comments.
Thanks, David. If you didn’t intend to imply there was a correlation, then, as you’ve said, it was just a misunderstanding on my behalf. Please accept my apology :)was very interesting and