1 Percent of America’s Power Plants Emit 33 Percent of Energy Industry’s Carbon

Viktorus/Shutterstock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Less than 1 percent of US power plants produce nearly a third of the energy industry’s carbon emissions, according to a new report released Tuesday. “If the 50 most-polluting U.S. power plants were an independent nation,” reads the report from Environment America Research & Policy Center, an independent nonprofit, “they would be the seventh-largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, behind Germany and ahead of South Korea.” The vast majority of the top 100 offenders—98 of them in fact—are coal plants.

The report, which comes in advance of a Environmental Protection Agency proposal on emissions standards for new power plants expected later this month, claims that cleaning up the biggest polluters could have an outsized impact on reducing greenhouse gases. A March EPA proposal suggested capping carbon production at 1,000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour produced for new plants. That’s well below the 3,000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour the dirtiest existing plants produce. Standards for existing plants are in the works, too—the EPA’s proposal is supposed to be submitted by June 2014 and finalized the following year. Even if the standards are weakened in the approval process, the average coal plant still produces more than twice as much carbon than allowed by the cap. That means new coal plants are “highly unlikely” to meet the EPA’s target, according to the report.

Source: Environment America Research & Policy Center

Today, the 50 dirtiest plants in the United States—all coal-fired—account for 2 percent of the world’s energy-related carbon pollution each year. That’s equal to the annual emissions from half of America’s 240 million cars. The 100 dirtiest plants—a tiny fraction of the country’s 6,000 power plants—account for a fifth of all US carbon emissions. According to the report, curbing the emissions of the worst offenders in the United States “is one of the most effective ways to reduce U.S. global warming pollution…reducing the risk that emissions will reach a level that triggers dangerous, irreversible climate change impacts.”

The United States has been trending away from coal, and a recent spate of bankruptcies and closings have thrown the future of coal-fired plants, and their potential for profit, into question. If the new EPA standards don’t change the US energy landscape, it’s possible that glut of cheap natural gas and looming expensive upgrades for coal plants will.

Here are the top 10 dirtiest plants in the states, and their yearly emissions:

  1. Georgia Power Co.’s Scherer Coal plant, Georgia (21.3 million metric tons)
  2. Alabama Power Co.’s James H. Miller Jr. plant, Alabama (20.7 million metric tons)
  3. Luminant Generation Company’s Martin Lake plant, Texas (18.8 million metric tons)
  4. Union Electric Co.’s Labadie plant, Missouri (18.5 million metric tons)
  5. NRG Texas Power’s W.A. Parish plant (17.8 million metric tons)
  6. Duke Energy Indiana Inc.’s Gibson plant (16.9 million metric tons)
  7. Ohio Power Co.’s General James M. Gavin plant (16.6 million metric tons)
  8. FirstEnergy Generation Corp.’s FirstEnergy Bruce Mansfield plant (16.4 million metric tons)
  9. Detroit Edison Co.’s Monroe plant (16.4 million metric tons)
  10. Salt River Project’s Navajo plant (15.9 million metric tons)

??You can see the full list here.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate