Besides trashing the Clean Power Plan, the president is pulling the United States out of a Paris climate accord that almost 200 other nations signed, and he intends to roll back vehicle-efficiency standards aimed at reducing tailpipe emissions, the greatest domestic source of greenhouse gases.
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The new plan, called the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, would replace President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which was the US response to efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions as part of the 2015 climate agreement in Paris.
Easing the pressure on industry will bolster coal’s fortunes over the next decade, compared with the clean power plan, as well as slightly reducing electricity prices.
President Donald Trump is hoping to fire up coal country by lifting federal regulations on greenhouse gases from power plants.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled Tuesday the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE), giving states broad authority to determine how to restrict their own emissions.
The EPA estimates that the ACE rule could reduce 2030 Carbon dioxide emission by up to 1.5 percent from projected levels without the CPP, which amounts to taking 5.3 million cars off the road.
Under the Trump plan, EPA aims to make power plants more efficient to meet emissions goals.
If implemented, Schneider said, “the result will actually be more pollution and unnecessary loss of life – by the EPA’s own reckoning about 1,000 avoidable deaths per year, while doing nothing to stem climate change”.
Except for maybe lawsuits.
In a press conference on Tuesday, EPA officials said every plan will be approved by the EPA, but that there’s “no lower limit” that states have to set their emissions standards above.
The attorneys general of Virginia and NY quickly criticized the EPA announcement and said they would sue to block the rule if it becomes law.
Bob Keefe, the head of a group called Environmental Entrepreneurs, wrote in a statement “Rolling back the Clean Power Plan is the wrong move-potentially costing 560,000 jobs and $52 billion in GDP-but this proposal solidifies that the administration has no interest in producing a meaningful energy vision that benefits American business and workers and helps America compete in a 21st century economy”.
Obama’s original “Clean Power Plan” would significantly reduce both carbon pollution and many toxic pollutants, including fine particulate matter and ozone smog. The organisation’s clean energy director Dylan Voorhees said it would be particularly bad for people living in ME because the state gets pollution from upwind power plants.
Just like Morrisey fought the Obama rule in court, several Democratic states like MA have promised to do the exact same thing for this new rule. In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the favour of industry and 27 states who argued that the Obama-era rule would harm them economically.
The plan was the centrepiece in an effort to lower emissions and help meet global climate change goals set out in the Paris agreement, which Trump has pledged to leave.
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On Tuesday night, Mr. Trump is visiting West Virginia – one of the states hit hardest by the decline of coal – in a rally supporting Republican Senate candidate Patrick Morrisey. We’ve seen how climate change is impacting Lake Erie, with algae blooms causing a water crisis for the communities that depend on it.
