D.C. law firm advises NPPD to get ready for warming

COLUMBUS (AP) - Nebraska's biggest power district has been advised to get ready for global warming.

Federal regulations or new taxes would raise the price of coal to Nebraska Public Power District and other power generators, a Washington, D.C., law firm told the NPPD board Wednesday.

For more than a decade, scientists have warned of shifting climate zones, rising oceans and more extreme weather events if emissions of heat-trapping gases, such as carbon dioxide, were not reined in.

The atmosphere today holds more than one-third more carbon dioxide - a byproduct of automobile engines, power plants and other burning of fossil fuels such as coal - than it did before the Industrial Revolution.

Stephen Fotis and Janet Anderson of the D.C. firm Van Ness Feldman told NPPD directors the federal government could begin taxing or otherwise regulating greenhouse gases within five, perhaps 10 years.

Global warming “has all our attention, and we are taking it very seriously,” said NPPD president Ron Asche.

A carbon dioxide “shadow” price of $9.45 per megawatt of coal-supplied electricity would help get NPPD ready for future regulations, a figure that Fotis and Anderson said was a “reasonable starting point.”

That could raise the cost of coal-generated power 33 percent to 40 percent.

But Asche said what federal regulations might say remains unknown, so NPPD can't say what its rate structure might look like when the day comes to start paying for global warming.

The attorneys also recommended that NPPD:

n determine how much greenhouse gas it produces;

n raise or otherwise improve output at its largest coal plant, the Sheldon Station near Hallam, and at its Cooper Nuclear Station near Brownsville;

n provide more incentives for conservation.

In the United States, emissions of greenhouse gases climbed by 16 percent between 1990 and 2004, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in its latest assessment.

Kyoto, a protocol to a 1992 United Nations climate treaty, mandates controls in 35 industrialized countries that on average would reduce greenhouse emissions by 5 percent from their 1990 levels by 2012, with varying limits assigned to individual countries.

The United States has not signed the Kyoto protocol.