Politicians and analysts said Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which faces fierce opposition from Republican quarters, should spur the worldwide effort to pin down a climate-rescue pact by year-end.
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“The EPA’s Clean Power Plan is the wrong direction”, Rutledge said in a news release.
State wide power agencies and government officials are expressing concern over the plan.
On August 3, the Denver Post cited Coffman’s concerns, where she’s quoted: “But as I put the best interests of Colorado first, it may become necessary to join other states in challenging President Obama’s authority under the Clean Air Act”.
Under the president’s Clean Power Plan, the EPA set the first-ever nationwide standards to limit greenhouse gas pollution from coal-fired power plants, America’s largest source of carbon pollution.
Power plants account for about a third of all U.S. emissions of the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming.
President Obama this week unveiled the final standards that would require power plants to sharply curb carbon dioxide emissions over the next 15 years.
The plan uses state-specific targets to reduce emissions by 32 percent by 2030 from levels recorded in 2005.
The US Government’s initiative comes as at least one leader in this region has acknowledged that the Caribbean needs to do more to address climate change.
Cutting carbon emissions is becoming more urgent as we can already see the effects of drastic weather events that we assumed would be far off in the future – witness the fires in California and flooding in Florida. But the regulations will mean billions of dollars of investments in technology to accommodate more solar and wind power, with the costs trickling down to every American. “We will have to wait another few years to find out if and how exactly distributed solar will be incentivized in each of the 50 states”, said Julie Pyper, a senior writer at Greentech Media, a leading news site that covers clean energy. “These regulations, if allowed to proceed, will do serious harm to West Virginia and the U.S. economy, and that is why we are taking quick action to bring this process to a halt”. It safeguards energy reliability by setting common-sense, achievable state-by-state goals that build on a rapidly growing clean energy economy and gives states and utilities the time and flexibility they need to meet their goals.
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“I applaud the Obama Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for focusing on the important issue of curtailing carbon emissions”.
