I am exhausted by the predictable outrage over the government letting energy companies cook the atmosphere. Did you really think you could run a dishwasher without consequences?
The news dropped on Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency will officially erase its limits on climate pollution from power plants. Predictably, my inbox is flooded with frantic emails from activists who still believe in the quaint fiction of federal regulation. They are crying about asthma rates, rising sea levels, and the fact that electricity generation is the second largest source of planet-warming gases in the United States. I simply closed my laptop, massaged my temples, and looked out my window. We are doing this again. You are all acting as though the E.P.A. is the villain here, rather than the natural consequence of your own insatiable appetite for indoor lighting.
Let us be brutally honest for a moment, assuming any of you still possess the capacity for self-reflection. The E.P.A. limits were a fantasy. They were a crutch for a society that refuses to take personal responsibility for its own grid dependency. You cannot sit in a heavily air-conditioned living room, streaming six consecutive hours of prestige television, and then throw a tantrum when the government decides to stop bullying the people shoveling the coal that makes your leisure possible. It is juvenile.
I recently had the misfortune of sitting through a panel on grid resilience at a summit in Davos, where I shared a stage with several chief executives from the nation’s largest utility monopolies. During a private lunch afterward, one of them looked physically diminished. He told me, over a plate of sustainably sourced sea bass, that trying to comply with the E.P.A.’s arbitrary emission caps was actively preventing him from focusing on his company’s core mission: maximizing quarterly dividends while burning fossil fuels. The sheer administrative burden of hiding their carbon output in their annual ESG report was taking a toll on his mental health. He actually had tears in his eyes as he described the difficulty of convincing regulators that a forty-year-old coal furnace was somehow a bridge fuel.
It was a clarifying moment. We demand these companies power our lives, yet we expect them to do it cleanly, quietly, and without leaving a dusting of toxic soot on our windowsills. The entitlement is staggering.
It is deeply unfair to ask a legacy energy provider to suddenly pivot to renewable infrastructure just because the earth is rapidly becoming uninhabitable.
By erasing these limits, the E.P.A. is simply removing a layer of bureaucratic greenwashing and forcing us to look at the ugly truth of our own consumption. Do you have any idea what it costs to safely decommission a coal-fired plant? The sheer volume of stranded assets sitting on the balance sheets of these utility giants is a tragedy we entirely ignore. If we force them to stop emitting carbon dioxide, billions of dollars of perfectly good, fully depreciated infrastructure will be prematurely abandoned. We are talking about historic, mid-century smokestacks that have been reliably poisoning the local watershed for three generations. But you do not care about the catastrophic financial implications for institutional investors, do you? You only care about the ozone layer.
But sure, go ahead and post a furious infographic about the E.P.A. on your social media accounts. Type it out on a smartphone powered by a lithium battery that was charged by a natural gas turbine spinning at three thousand revolutions per minute. It is so much easier to blame a federal agency for erasing a pollution limit than it is to look in the mirror and admit that you are the one who left the porch light on overnight.
The transition away from fossil fuels was always going to require immense sacrifice. I have been saying this for a decade. It is just that the sacrifice will not be made by the utility companies’ profit margins, but rather by the respiratory health of the general public. And frankly, considering how little you have all done to reduce your personal baseload demand, I find it hard to muster any sympathy. The E.P.A. is finally treating you like adults. Take a deep breath of the newly unregulated air and accept your complicity.