As EPA Rolls Back Clean Power Plan, Will This be Our Future?
WASHINGTON D.C. - The Trump administration has taken formal steps to repeal the Clean Power Plan. At an event in eastern Kentucky, Administrator Scott Pruitt said his predecessors had departed from regulatory norms in creating the Clean Power Plan, which was a signature Obama era policy. The policy which was finalized in 2015, would have pushed states to move away from coal and move towards alternative, clean power sources.
“The war on coal is over. Tomorrow in Washington D.C., I will be signing a proposed rule to roll back the Clean Power Plan. No better place to make that announcement than Hazard, Ky.” Mr. Pruitt said. This will make it even more unlikely that the United States will fulfill its promise as part of the Paris climate agreement to cut emissions that are warming the planet and contributing to heat waves and sea-level rise.
As Oklahoma attorney general, Scott Pruitt lead more than two dozen cases against the EPA making the same argument for many of the cases: the Obama administration exceeded its legal authority in an effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. A leaked draft of the repeal proposal asserts that the country would save $33 billion by not complying with the regulation and rejects the Obama administration had calculated from the original rule.
Coal and natural gas fired power plants are responsible for one-third of America’s carbon dioxide emissions. When the Clean Power Plan was proposed in 2015, it was expected to cut power plant emissions by 32 percent by 2030. While many states already began shifting away from coal, this will slow the process down by a considerably.
New York City produces twice as much trash as any other mega-city on other, according to a recent study. The Environmental Protection Agency has described described Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal as “one of the nation’s most extensively contaminated water bodies.” But before the EPA was formed, pollution in New York City was even worse. And with the current administration, that fear is coming back. The EPA has already rolled back a number of environmental regulations and moved toward repealing the Clean Water Rule, which clarified the Clean Water Act to repent industries from dumping pollutants into waterways and wetlands.
Pruitt told the Washington Examiner in interview last month that he would see to regulate power plants individually, in a process known as “inside the fence line.” For examples the EPA could mandate heat rate improvements in power plants, which would burn coal more efficiently by creating more electricity per unit of coal. Carbon capture and storage, known as CCS, removes carbon dioxide from a power plant’s exhaust, so as to not release it into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. There can be enormous reductions within the fence line by requiring carbon capture and storage. But others say CCS is too expensive to enforce power plants to adopt it. The repeal plan introduced by the Trump administration could take months to implement. And Congress is the only ones who can make a stronger policy.
