He warned that because the problem is so large, if the world doesn’t get it right quickly, it may become impossible to reverse, leaving populations unable to adapt.
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President Barack Obama presented his final plan for carbon dioxide reduction targets on Mond… This year, Oregon’s low-carbon fuel standard was extended.
A more pressing question is whether a judge will issue a stay – essentially putting the regulations on hold while both sides’ lawyers duke it out – or let them go into effect, forcing power plants to make immediate changes.
Many Republican-led states have said their states simply won’t comply. “They are the ones who must rush to the emergency room when they can not breathe because of worsened ozone pollution during a heat wave, or when smoke blows into their yard from wildfires across state lines”.
The plan the White House unveiled today to reduce carbon dioxide emissions nationwide is meeting with strong and broad criticism in Montana. These actions are all the more critical as we draw closer to the UN climate negotiations in Paris this December. To Republicans, Obama’s actions to curb greenhouse gas emissions are burdensome to business and block job creation.
Monday the president made the case for imposing new mandatory emissions standards on power plants that would reduce carbon output by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Obama’s proposed version last year called only for a 30 percent cut.
As a matter of fact, Obama had delayed the time to implement the first round of emissions reduction from 2020 to 2022 in view of possible difficulties ahead, in a compromise to complaints from states which said the original deadline was too soon. He says Tallahassee will be in charge of crafting the plan for Florida to come in compliance with the new regulations, likely under the leadership of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
Some states have already announced plans to fight the new rules in court, but Alaska won’t have to. EPA encourages states to include “the continued commitment of the owner/operators to completion of the new units” in their plans.
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In Pennsylvania: Matt Elliot, senior policy advisor for Keystone Energy Efficiency Alliance, said Pennsylvania is in a good position to realize the benefits of the plan, which requires states to submit an initial plan by 2016 and a final plan by 2018. A press release says the labor union is “worried about what this means for the hundreds of working families whose livelihoods depend on the coal industry, the communities that depend on those jobs, Montana’s tax base and the ratepayers that could be impacted by these changes”.
