Pennsylvania House Democratic Policy Committee Hearing
Testimony of Thomas Schuster
On behalf of the Sierra Club
Regarding: Climate Change Impacts in Pennsylvania and the
Benefits of a Clean Energy Transition
8/26/2014
I Introduction
My name is Thomas Schuster and I am a Senior Campaign
Representative with the Sierra Club in Pennsylvania. The Sierra Club is the oldest and largest
non-profit environmental advocacy organization in the United States, with
approximately 24,000 members in Pennsylvania.
My testimony today will address misperceptions about the cost of
confronting climate disruption. Not only
is inaction on climate disruption much more costly than mitigating it, but a transition
to a clean energy economy will actually create jobs and
savings on balance.
II.
The Need for Action to Address
Climate Disruption
The costs of failing to adequately deal with climate
disruption, caused mainly by carbon pollution, are immense. By the end of the century, the northeast as a
region is expected to see an additional 57 days per year (nearly 2 more full
months) of temperatures over 95 degrees.[1] This will have severe consequences on our
health, our economy, and the infrastructure and natural systems on which we all
depend. Higher average temperature leads
to worse air quality, and in turn more hospital admissions and premature
deaths, particularly among children. It
leads to the spread of vector-borne diseases that were once only problems in
the tropics. It leads to more frequent
intense storms, which can damage our homes and threaten our lives with high
winds and flooding. It also threatens
our economy. A 10-year flood in
Allegheny County costs over $8 billion to clean up,[2]
and that is money that can’t be invested in growing our regional economy. These damages will only become more severe if
we don’t curtail carbon pollution.
Agriculture currently employs more people in Pennsylvania than
extraction of coal, oil, and gas combined.[3] The sector is projected to suffer from
extreme heat, droughts and storms, and could shed many thousands of jobs. These are but a few examples of the impacts
that will touch every aspect of our lives.
It has been recently estimated that allowing global average
temperatures to rise by 3 degrees Celsius, rather than 2 degrees (which we are
already very likely to experience), will reduce annual economic productivity by
1% per year.[4] This equates to over $6 billion per year in
lost productivity in Pennsylvania. That
is from a one degree differential; even higher temperatures are quite likely if
no additional action is taken, and the economic losses would accelerate. It has also been estimated that every decade
of delay in taking action to reduce climate disrupting pollution increases
mitigation costs by about 40%.[5]
Pennsylvania makes an outsized contribution to climate
disruption. Pennsylvania is the source
of about 1% of global carbon pollution,[6]
despite comprising less than 0.2% of the world’s population. While it is true that neither Pennsylvania
nor the United States can solve the climate disruption problem on our own, it
is also obvious that due to our disproportionate contribution to the problem, our
national leadership on the issue is necessary if we are to reach an
international solution, and Pennsylvania will be a key part of a national
solution.
III.
Meeting Clean Power Plan Requirements
On June 2, 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency
introduced a proposal that would limit, for the first time, the carbon
pollution from existing power plants. The
draft rules for Pennsylvania require a reduction in carbon pollution intensity (or
pounds of pollution per MWh of electricity) by 31% between 2012 and 2030.
We are well on our way to meeting this target, according to
our internal analysis. Coal power plant
retirements that have occurred or been announced since 2012 will achieve at
least 14% of the required reduction. Our
existing energy efficiency requirement for utilities, if continued at current
levels, will achieve an additional 14%, while the Alternative Energy Portfolio
Standards will achieve more than 23% of our requirement. Together, these three tranches get us more
than halfway to Pennsylvania’s goal, just by maintaining the status quo. If we increase our clean energy requirement
to 20% per year by 2020, and our efficiency target to 1.5% per year, we would
achieve about 96% of our required reduction.
These higher targets would merely put us on par with most other states
in the northeast.
IV.
Benefits of Clean Energy and
Efficiency
In addition to reducing carbon pollution from the electric
sector, efficiency and clean, renewable energy offer numerous other benefits. I want to focus on the benefits of renewable
energy specifically, because it is often misunderstood.
a. Renewable Energy Reduces
Electricity Prices
Numerous studies have shown that addition of renewable energy
into the electricity mix causes the most expensive, least efficient fossil fuel
generators to operate less, which lowers electricity cost. Most recently, it was found that the eleven
states with the highest amount of wind energy installed have seen electricity
prices decrease slightly since 2008, while in the remaining states, the price
of electricity has increased by nearly 8% over the same time.[7] A Pennsylvania-specific analysis of a
hypothetical doubling of our renewable energy targets projected that savings
from price suppression would outstrip direct costs by a factor of at least 2:1.[8]
b. Renewable Energy is Reliable
Already, the states of Iowa and South Dakota get more than
20% of their electricity from wind power, but we can go much farther than
that. PJM, the operator of the regional
grid, has concluded that we can get at least 30% of our energy from wind and
solar by 2026 with no reliability problems, minimal changes to the transmission
infrastructure, and net savings on wholesale energy prices.[9] The non-partisan Regulatory Assistance
Project reviewed eleven studies by respected firms and concluded that renewable
energy levels well over 50% are feasible given current technology.[10]
Supporters of coal often point to the extreme cold snaps of
January 2014 as a reason to continue reliance on coal. Putting aside for the moment the fact that a
polar vortex is a predicted result of rising artic temperatures and melting
polar ice that will increase in frequency with warmer global temperatures, it
must be noted that coal did not perform particularly well during that
time. In fact, while 22% of the total
generating capacity in PJM territory was unavailable during the most critical
time, over 1/3 of that total (13.7 gigawatts) was coal capacity.[11] This included the largest coal-fired power
plant in Pennsylvania, the Bruce Mansfield Generating Station. According to a May PJM report, only two types
of resources performed better than expected during this extreme event: demand response
and wind power.[12] Beyond PJM, wind power was also critical to
preventing blackouts in the Midwest and in Texas during the polar vortex.[13]
c. Renewable Energy Creates Jobs
Numerous studies have also shown that clean energy
investments create more jobs per dollar spent, per megawatt of capacity, and
per megawatt-hour of generation than comparable investments in fossil
fuels. There are already more workers in
the solar and wind industries in this country than there are in the coal
industry, despite coal being responsible for a much larger share of the current
electricity mix.[14] It has been projected that a transition to a
100% clean energy economy in Pennsylvania by 2050, including maximizing energy
efficiency, would create half a million 40-year jobs, which is more than 10
times the number the coal industry currently supports.[15] Widely
distributed sources of energy also offer important tax revenue streams for
rural towns and communities, helping keep schools, libraries, and firehouses
open.
We recognize that even though the transition to cleaner forms
of energy will be a net benefit to the Commonwealth, there are some
coal-dependent communities that will be disproportionately impacted by this
transition. We support an effort by
leaders at the federal, state, and local levels to work to understand the needs
of these communities and their workers, and to develop fully funded programs to
aid in the transition. We cannot afford
to postpone the transition to cleaner energy, but we also cannot put all the
impacts on the shoulders of a few while the rest enjoy the benefits.
Thank you
for your time,
Thomas Schuster
Senior Campaign Representative
The Sierra Club
PO Box 51
Windber, PA 15963
(814) 467-2614
[1] http://riskybusiness.org/report/overview/regions/northeast
[2]
National Conference of State Legislatures, Assessing the Costs of Climate
Change, http://www.ncsl.org/print/environ/ClimateChangePA.pdf
[3] US
Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2012 statistics
[4] Multiple sources, cited in The Cost of Delaying
Action to Stem Climate Change, July 2104: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/the_cost_of_delaying_action_to_stem_climate_change.pdf
[5]
Id.
[6] 2009
Pennsylvania Climate Change Action Plan.
The 2013 update to the plan did not calculate our share of global
emissions.
[8] Black
&Veatch, “Assessment of a 15 percent Pennsylvania Alternative Energy
Portfolio Standard”: http://pennfuture.org/UserFiles/File/Legislation/HB80SB92_Report201001.pdf
[12]
Id. at 20
[14] AWEA
U.S. Wind Industry Annual Market Report 2010; Solar Foundation National Solar
Jobs Census 2010; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
