Here’s How President Trump Could Dismantle Obama’s Climate Rules
Mother Jones
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This story was first published by the Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The Republican presidential candidates gathering in Cleveland for Thursday’s debate are sure to get questions about the Affordable Care Act, Planned Parenthood, and immigration.
All of those issues deserve attention. But maybe the first question should be about President Barack Obama’s latest effort to slow climate change.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday released a final version of new regulations designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. Technically, the regulations are part of the Clean Air Act, which became law in the 1970s and gives the federal government broad powers to regulate pollutants that threaten public health.
The new regulations call upon states to devise plans that cut down on carbon output from power plants—which, in practice, could mean anything from shutting down aging coal-fired generators to creating multi-state markets for trading pollution permits. States must produce their plans by 2018, and begin making cuts by 2020. In states where officials decline to submit plans, as the law envisions, the EPA will step in and impose blueprints of its own making. (The Huffington Post‘s Kate Sheppard has all the details—and the case Obama is making in favor of these new regulations.)
Monday’s announcement is the latest step in the Obama administration’s ongoing effort to limit greenhouse gases. The idea is to reduce carbon emissions from existing power plants by about one-third, relative to 2005 levels, by 2030. You can make a credible argument that, taken together, the president’s efforts to slow climate change belong alongside the Affordable Care Act, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the Dodd-Frank financial reforms as cornerstones of Obama’s legacy on domestic policy.
But that depends, in part, on the next administration implementing these new regulations faithfully. And that may not happen.
Even before the rules became final, Republicans were vowing to fight them. “This is going to be a disaster,” Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, told a gathering of conservative donors that the Koch Brothers convened on Sunday. Formal release of the regulations on Monday produced still more condemnations. “This is a buzzsaw to the nation’s economy,” Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, said at a candidate forum in New Hampshire.
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Here’s How President Trump Could Dismantle Obama’s Climate Rules
