President Obama will unveil a new series of major environmental regulations Monday to combat climate change, including steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
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“Climate change is not a problem for another generation”, he says.
NPR’s Scott Horsley reports that the new regulations are actually tougher than the ones unveiled by the Environmental Protection Agency in a draft proposal in June of 2014.
The Washington Post quoted an unnamed White House official as saying: “This is the most significant action any US president has taken to curb greenhouse gases”.
In the announcement, Obama named power plants as the “single biggest source of the harmful carbon pollution that contributes to climate change”.
The rule assigns each state a target for reducing its carbon pollution from power plants but allows states to create their own plans for doing so.
He added that the unprecedented carbon dioxide limits contained in the plan, to be unveiled on Monday, were founded on decades of data proving the negative effects of global warming on the environment, and human health and wellbeing.
The EPA’s initial proposal would have forced states with a lot of natural-gas plants and scope for renewable power growth, such as Arizona, to make cuts in emissions of more than 50 percent by 2030.
The anticipated final climate change rules have already set off what is expected to be broad legal, legislative and political backlash as dozens of states, major corporations and industry groups prepare to file lawsuits challenging them. Republicans and the coal industry have attacked the plan as a “war on coal”, and GOP presidential candidates have pledged to try to roll it back if elected.
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, has started a pre-emptive campaign against the rules, asking governors to refuse to comply. Experts estimate that as many as 25 states will join in a suit against the rules and that the disputes will end up before the Supreme Court.
The looser deadline came after states and electric utilities spent months appealing to the EPA for more time to comply. The plan, which relies on cutting the reliance on coal and natural gas and replacing it with lower-carbon resources, will put the country on the path to meeting Obama’s pledge to negotiators trying to reach a global accord this year, an administration official said.
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All sides agree that the rule, if it stands, could substantially alter the U.S. energy landscape, driving the expanded use of “clean” energy while further diminishing coal’s long dominance as a source of power for homes and businesses. Moving the compliance date for the plan to 2022 from 2020 could make achieving that goal hard. They asked not to be identified discussing the details before the plan is released.
